A Quote by Roberto Rossellini

Ever since ROME, OPEN CITY, I have maintained a conscious, determined endeavor to try to understand the world in which I live, in a spirit of humility and respect for the facts and for history. What as the meaning of ROME, OPEN CITY? We were emerging from the tragedy of the war. We had all taken part in it, for we were all its victims. I sought only to picture the essence of things. I had absolutely no interest in telling a romanticized tale along the usual lives of film drama. The actual facts were each more dramatic than any screen cliche.

Roberto Rossellini

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Absolutely Actual Along Any City Cliche Conscious Determined Drama Dramatic Each Emerging Endeavor Essence Ever Facts Film Had History Humility Interest Live Lives Maintained Meaning Meaning Of More No Interest Only Open Part Picture Respect Rome Screen Since Sought Spirit Taken Tale Telling Than Things Tragedy Try Understand Usual Victims War Were Which World

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Roberto Rossellini
Italian - Director
May 8, 1906 - June 3, 1977

I had proposed to HBO a series about the city cops in Rome at the time of Nero. What had interested me was the idea of order without law. The Praetorian Guard, who were the emperor's guards, understood how they were to proceed. But for the city cops, who were called the Urban Cohorts, there was no law at all.

David Milch

Since the building of Constantinople, and the removal of the seat of government to that city, no political quarrel separated Rome from Egypt. Pagan Rome, ever since the union of the two countries under Augustus, except when interrupted by the rebellions, had been eagerly copying the superstitions of Egypt, and Christian Rome still followed the same course.

Samuel Sharpe

My parents were not born in Vienna, but they had spent much of their lives there, having each come to the city at the beginning of World War I when they were still very young.

Eric Kandel

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and heart to get there. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

Ronald Reagan

Thus again the Netherlands, for the first time since the fall of Rome, were united under one crown imperial. They had already been once united, in their slavery to Rome.

John Lothrop Motley

There were never a lot of attacks on my work. We were building more parks than were ever built in the city, building more recreation centers, fixing more streets. We had national events, the Super Bowl, the (Major League Baseball) All-Star game, Final Four. We built seven hotels. The city hadn't built a hotel in 20 or more years.

Kwame Kilpatrick

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.

James Baldwin

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

George Eliot

Rome is the city above all cities which loses most of its meaning to those who do not bring to it some historical sense, a decent knowledge of art, and a good amount of time. Rome therefore is particularly disturbing to an American.

Clare Boothe Luce

No one painted a more accurate picture of military depredation than Vergil. Inspired though he was by the Latin spirit and by his pride in Rome, he nevertheless glorified Rome's true mission as one of providing the world with the rules of peace and justice.

Ernesto Teodoro Moneta

These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and more alone.

James Baldwin

At the hour of midnight the Salerian gate was silently opened, and the inhabitants were awakened by the tremendous sound of the Gothic trumpet. Eleven hundred and sixty-three years after the foundation of Rome, the Imperial city, which had subdued and civilised so considerable a part of mankind, was delivered to the licentious fury of the tribes of Germany and Scythia.

Edward Gibbon

If you look back in history, as the barbarians were invading the gates of Rome, people were consulting fortunetellers and worrying about the end of the world and all sorts of other apocalyptic notions. When the tsars were finally overthrown, they were all reading tarot cards even as the revolutionaries were banging at the gates.

Matt Taibbi

To the Jews, Rome constituted the quintessence of all that was odious and should be swept away from off the face of the earth. They hated Rome and her device, arma et leges, with an inhuman hatred. True, Rome had leges, laws, like the Jews. But in their very resemblance lay their difference; for the Roman laws were merely the practical application of the arma, the arms...but without the arms, the leges were empty formulae.

Joseph Kastein

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

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

Francis Parkman

A Quote by Roberto Rossellini

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