Italian Music Quotes

#1. I had brought from Paris the national prejudice against Italian music; but I had also received from nature that acute sensibility against which prejudices are powerless. I soon contracted the passion it inspires in all those born to understand it.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#2. My CD collection has a lot of world music - lots of Indian, African, Portuguese, Greek, Italian music. Because of my husband, a lot of jazz, too.

Kiran Ahluwalia

#3. Growing up, my grandmother did not want worldly music in the house. Then when I went out to California, I started listening to Spanish music, mostly Mexican music. But were I in Egypt, I would listen to the music of the people, or if I was in Italy, I'd listen to Italian music.

Maya Angelou

#4. We were raised in an Italian-American household, although we didn't speak Italian in the house. We were very proud of being Italian, and had Italian music, ate Italian food.

Francis Ford Coppola

#5. I felt frustrated by the limitations of rock and the lifestyle of touring around on a bus and playing the same songs over and over. So I went back to school to study music, and one of the things I got into was the Italian opera composer Puccini.

Rivers Cuomo

#6. The English were fascinated with the Italian people and their amazing Epicurean culture. Italian poetry, painting, pornography, music, drama, fashion, wine, women, cheese, anything Italiano was a premium commodity in London during Shakespeare's day.

Mark Lamonica

#7. The music throbbed in a voice of singular and delicate power; the air was resonant with melody, love and pain. The meanest Italian in the gallery far up beneath the ceiling, the most exalted of the land in the boxes and the stalls, leaned indulgently forward, to be swept by this sweet storm of song.

Gilbert Parker

#8. Italians have always had a high savings rate. They love putting their money into their own government bonds - even more than in houses, stocks and gold. The higher rates climb, the happier they are to invest. So if austerity plans drive rates up, it's music to Italian ears.

Kenneth Fisher

#9. An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

Edith Wharton

#10. For that you should read the original. In very great poetry the music often comes through even when one doesn't know language. I loved Dante passionately before I knew a word of Italian.

Donna Tartt

#11. There is no phase of the Italian mind that has not found expression in its music.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#12. Giovanni always had music running through his head. Moments he experienced in life recalled for him scenes from operas. [Giovanni Tempesta]

Vincent B. "Chip" LoCoco

#13. I've been singing my whole life, since I was a kid; but never formally as a career. I did it in plays when I was younger, and I sang all styles of music: everything from Italian opera to blues.

Brittany Murphy

#14. I studied voice at Yale with Blake Stern from the music school, and he had me singing German lieder and Italian songs.

Michael Cerveris

#15. I have sat through an Italian opera, til, for sheer pain, and inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of the crowded street, to solace myself with sounds which I was not obliged to follow and get rid of the distracting torment of endless, fruitless, barren attention!

Charles Lamb

#16. I love the Italian culture - it's a beautiful culture. I love the language, the Italian people, their music, their attitudes ... I just love it! Sometimes I think I'm an Italian trapped in a Spanish woman's body.

Penelope Cruz