Nietzsche in Italy Quotes

“In a few days he writes The Antichrist.2 Make no mistake: this brilliant essay is not directed against the person of Jesus and his doctrine, but against his interpreters, the priests. Perhaps no single thinker or even poet felt and understood the person of Christ more sensitively than Nietzsche.”
― Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy

“have forty-three years behind me and I feel as lonely as if I were a child.” All remains to be done and said. His work is still only the outline of an idea, a promise, and he would falter at his task if it were not for music. “She alone delivers me from myself, she sobers me up, orientates me towards myself, as if I looked down on myself from a great height, as if I had the sensation of being at a very high vantage point. She fortifies me, and regularly, following an evening of music (I have listened to Carmen now four times), a morning dawns redolent with energetic sights and discoveries. It is quite remarkable. It is as if I have bathed in a more neutral element. Life without music is simply a mistake, enfeeblement, an exile.” (Letter to Gast.)”
― Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy

“He also made a short trip to Florence that year. I don’t think he saw a single “work of art” there. He was now solely a man for the open air. But he went up to San Miniato4 and gazed down on the city from above, like Dante, like Michelangelo, like all of us who have rooted on the terraces of that cemetery a memory that will accompany us until death. These are places at once too powerful and too gentle for us not to situate the face there on which all the beloved Florence of our heart is depicted. This beautiful eye which gazes at the dome in its mist, this mouth which smiles on the most tender city in Italy, this is our San Miniato and the poetry of our Tuscan mornings.”
― Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy

“He also made a short trip to Florence that year. I don’t think he saw a single “work of art” there.”
― Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy

“Then there is the music of Peter Gast. No life is possible without music.”
― Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy

“Then there is the music of Peter Gast.”
― Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy

“Whoever ascends to Èze today, in 1929, no longer takes the stony paths the philosopher climbed in 1884, but travels by car via the Nouvelle Corniche;”
― Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy

“Before the Basilica of Constantine he exclaims: “That there is struggle and inequality even in beauty, war for power and for superpower, is what we are instructed here in the clearest allegory”
― Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy

“It was Rome. Rome, Piazza Barberini no. 56, ultimo piano, with the Swiss landscape painter Muller.”
― Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy

“And Nietzsche, without knowing that the “sorcerer” had surprised the ancient secret of the city, wrote to Peter Gast: “Last night brought me again, while I paused on the Rialto bridge, a music that left me in tears, an ancient adagio, so incredibly ancient that there simply couldn’t have been an adagio before this one.”
― Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy

“City of a hundred profound solitudes;”
― Guy de Pourtalès, Nietzsche in Italy