The moon is like freedom: it is in the sky and at the bottom of the well. - Antonio Delfini

A writer is always someone, to me, who has failed at something else in life.

I went to Bologna on the trail of Stendhaliane days and I lost myself, with my heart squeezed like a sensitive hazelnut in his shell, in the itineraries of Dino Campana. If I had been a poet instead of a bourgeois on the road to disappointment, that would have been the time to write some poems. I left Florence around midday and an hour later I was in Bologna. I wandered around all the streets and when I couldn't stand it anymore due to tiredness, I went to the station and took the first train to Florence: this also happened at two or three in the morning. The strangeness was this: that being in Florence, I ignored Florence and got to know Bologna. (From Introduction, pp. 93-94)

She took a long sigh and slowly stood up. Big and heavy, with a wide and long gray skirt with black stripes, and a dark, all-worked blouse that smelled like a closed cupboard with biscuits forgotten inside. (From The Milliner, p. 123)