- Performer Name:
- Performance Venue:
- Florence
- Performance Date:
- 1821
- Author:
- [Dwight, Theodore]
- Date Written:
- Language:
- English
- Publication Title:
- A Journal of a Tour in Italy, in the Year 1821
- Article Title:
- Page Numbers:
- 405
- Additional Info:
- Publisher:
- Place of Publication:
- New York
- Date Published:
- 1824
Text:
[An account of a "motley multitude of maskers" encountered in the streets of Florence during Carnival:] Their leader was a tall, ragged personage, who performed the part of an improvisatore, but in so high a style of burlesque, that I think I can never lose the recollection of his looks and actions. He was painted in such a manner as to give his countenance an expression of the utmost self-complacency, and yet to counteract all the kind designs of nature in rendering it agreeable. These itinerants were entirely abstracted from every thing except their own immediate concerns. Whenever they stopped, it was with their faces fixed on their leader; and though in the thickest crowd, paid not the least regard to any thing about them. The poet would sometimes assume the air of one in the highest regions of poetic rapture, looking into some distant cloud, and trilling till he shook in his shoes; while his conceptions were often of the most ludicrous kind, and his lines ran on and halted in a style quite irresistible.
Notes:
"By an American." British Library catalogue ascribes the work to T. Dwight.
- Collected by:
- AE