She quickly learned that the sight of Venice at given moments can root you in your deepest longings. It can also make you realise your identity too is built on shifting water, consists of rising and falling tides, countless ephemeral reflections and refractions. Venice can wash through you the love you have never made, the battles you have never fought, the beauty you have never created. It can flood to the surface everything you have lost and everything you have never known. It can reveal you to yourself without your carnival masks.

Glenn Haybittle, The War in Venice

Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, The Forest House (Avalon, #2)