Alessandro Michele Quotes

When I was young, I was interested in Renaissance art.

Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them.

At 18 I wanted to study art history in Florence. I think I just fancied myself as Sophia Loren, wearing a foxy dress and walking through a market with a basket bursting full of figs.

Florence and art is something that is part of my life and is part of myself.

The very beginning of European aesthetics started from Florence. Everything here was beauty, money, and creativity, the power of the good money.

In Italy, there are so many significant architectural structures in history such as the Pantheon in Rome, or the Duomo.

Italy will never be a normal country. Because Italy is Italy. If we were a normal country, we wouldn't have Rome. We wouldn't have Florence. We wouldn't have the marvel that is Venice.

I was brought up in Florence, a beautiful medieval town whose rhythm is completely in antiquity.

One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

No Roman ever was able to say, 'I dined last night with the Borgias'.

Jackie's dream was France, but mine was really art and Italy, as that was all I cared about through school. My history of art teacher, who saved my life at Farmington, was obsessed with Bernard Berenson, and I succumbed as well.

You go to Florence and all the paintings you've seen in books are there. To see them in real life, it just blows your mind.

Arcadia' was started and finished at the Medici villa in Rome.

I was really into Michelangelo in seventh and eighth grade.

I remember touring the Medici palace in Florence when I was younger and I was entranced by the beauty and elegance of every space.

The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.

If there is one country and its people that have contributed most to western civilisation's man-made world continuously for the last 2000 years, it must surely be Italy.

Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?

Last time I checked, there were no Americans at all in Renaissance art.

I have been using polka dots since I was a very young child. Only after that, it seems, have they been used throughout the rest of the art world.

The paintings by Van Gough and Chagall had a big influence on me.

The Italian Renaissance extends beyond food, of course. Just about every major Italian furniture designer now has a shop in Paris, and Le Bon Marche recently opened an outlet for Santa Maria Novella perfumes, elixirs and soaps from Florence on its ground floor.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

Between their rise in the thirteenth century and their sudden fall in the seventeenth, when the line abruptly ended, the Medicis produced three popes, two queens, and many Florentine rulers, and they supported the work of Galileo, Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Botticelli - a veritable parade of geniuses.

To be in Florence is to reflect on Europe's intricate diversity - and its lost creativity.