"Cicerone" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pavement, but it possesses a most picturesque little church. It was one of the rotten boroughs swept away, and properly enough, by the Reform Bill. Here our rustic relinquished his burden to a Hindon lad, who acted as our future cicerone, and undertook to show us the way to the inn called the Beckford Arms. Soon after leaving Hindon the woods of Fonthill were reached. We mounted a somewhat steep hill, and here met with a specimen ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown
... illustrious among these, we may argue from the fact that they should have endured so far to degrade the name of one among their noblest, that every glib and loquacious hireling who shows strangers about their picture- galleries, palaces, and ruins, is called 'cicerone,' or a Cicero! It is unfortunate that terms like these, having once sprung up, are not again, or are not easily again, got rid of. They remain, testifying to an ignoble past, and in some sort helping to maintain it, long after the temper and tone of mind that produced them has passed away. [Footnote: ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... rear of the balcony, a broad-brimmed, ecclesiastical beaver was visible. An abbate, probably an acquaintance and cicerone of the English family, was sitting there, and enjoying the scene, though partially withdrawn from view, as the decorum ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... boat broached-to and capsized; and all hands were submerged. Only the brother himself, who was well used to the experience, skipped ashore, by some miracle of agility, with scarce a sprinkling. Thenceforward, during our stay at Hiva-oa, he was our cicerone and patron; introducing us, taking us excursions, serving us in every way, and making himself daily ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... often red, and bare feet, all the little individual traits, which impress us on our first visit to a foreign country, were carefully noted down. The Duke and Duchess of Buccleugh proved a noble host and hostess, but they could provide no such cicerone for the Queen as was furnished for George IV., when Sir Walter Scott showed him Edinburgh, and for the Governor of the Netherlands, when Rubens introduced him to Antwerp. Neither did any peer or chief appear on the occasion of the Queen's visit, with ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... caused it. A foot had shifted on the plaster floor. There was someone else then looking out over the desert. A sudden idea struck her. Probably it was Count Anteoni. He knew she was coming and might have decided to act once more as her cicerone. He had not heard her climbing the stairs, and, having gone to the far side of the tower, was no doubt watching the sunset, lost in a dream as ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... week and always at ten in the morning. I was led to expect that one of these visits would be paid on a certain day about a week ago, and I accordingly managed to be on the look-out in company with my cicerone at a quarter to ten, and the hour and the lady came with equal punctuality. My friend and I were standing under an archway, a little way back from the street, but she saw us, and gave me a glance that I shall be ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... fact is I have talked and laughed enough for years instead of weeks, so [that] my memory is quite confounded with the noise. I am delighted to hear you are turned geologist: when I pay the Isle of Wight a visit, which I am determined shall somehow come to pass, you will be a capital cicerone to the famous line of dislocation. I really suppose there are few parts of the world more interesting to a geologist than your island. Amongst the great scientific men, no one has been nearly so friendly and kind as Lyell. I have seen him ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the result to himself. A mind might lie quiescent so long as it was ministered to, and hedged from cares and duties, but wake up when something was required of it! No one would have thought anything amiss with my uncle, that heard him giving his orders for the day, or acting cicerone to the little company—there for his sake, though he did not know it. How often John and I looked at each other, and how glad were our hearts! My uncle was fast coming to himself! It was like watching the dead ...
— The Flight of the Shadow • George MacDonald
... coquettish reticence after another, much as we learn the heart of a friend, the whole loveliness of the country. This disposition always preserves something new to be seen, and takes us, like a careful cicerone, to many different points of distant view before it allows us finally ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... few days after their arrival Claude did not think of work. He tried to give himself up to the new impressions that crowded in upon him in Northern Africa. Charmian eagerly acted as cicerone. That spoiled things sometimes for Claude, but he did not care to say so to his wife. So he sent that secret to join the many secrets which, carefully kept from her, combined to make a sort of subterranean life running its course in the darkness of ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... wooden furniture, we can suppose,—in each of his Majesty's royal Palaces, was set apart for this evening service, and became the Tabagie of his Majesty. A Tabagie-room in the Berlin Schloss, another in the Potsdam, if the cicerone had any knowledge, could still be pointed out:—but the Tobacco-PIPES that are shown as Friedrich Wilhelm's in the KUNSTKAMMER or Museum of Berlin, pipes which no rational smoker, not compelled to it, would have used, awaken just doubt as to the cicerones; and you leave ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume V. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... where the dead lived. We care nothing about the ancients on Highgate Hill—but at Baiae, Pompeii, by the Virgilian Hades, the ancients are society with which we thirst to be familiar. To the animated and curious Frenchwoman what a cicerone was Ernest Maltravers! How eagerly she listened to accounts of a life more elegant than that of Paris!—of a civilisation which the world never can know again! So much the better;—for it was rotten at the core, though most brilliant in the complexion. Those cold names and unsubstantial ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which is divided and made more brilliant by a vigorous piece of shadow thrust into the midst of it, and which dies away in lesser fragments and sparkling towards the extremities of the picture. This mass of light is as interesting by its composition as by its intensity. The cicerone who escorts the stranger round the sacristy in the course of five minutes and allows him some forty seconds for the contemplation of a picture which the study of six months would not entirely fathom, directs ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... appointed by the President, not upon the recommendation of the Secretary. Here was a muss not larger than a mustard-seed; but it might grow, for I knew well how sensitive was the nature of the Secretary; and he had not been consulted. And so I took it upon myself to be cicerone to the stranger. He was very grateful,—for a long time. Col. B. had graduated at West Point in the same class with the President and Bishop Polk, and subsequently, after following various pursuits, being once, I believe, a preacher, became ...
— A Rebel War Clerk's Diary at the Confederate States Capital • John Beauchamp Jones
... possible about his movements, or who it was who was with him. Perhaps it was for this reason that John desired to take him out, and even cut short his day's work on one or two occasions to act as cicerone to Philip. He took him to the House, to the great excitement and delight of the boy, who only wished that the entertainment could have been made complete by a speech from Uncle John, which was a point in which his guide, philosopher, and friend, ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... at that season, when the city is overrun with them, could hardly have been more welcome than a book agent to that busy man, but there was not a trace of annoyance in his greeting. He sent away his companions and devoted himself to the duties of a cicerone as cheerfully as though that were the chief end of the president of a university. We went the rounds of class-rooms, halls and dormitories, our interest and ...
— American Missionary, August, 1888, (Vol. XLII, No. 8) • Various
... 'Calvus, qui diu cum Cicerone iniquissimam litem de principatu eloquentiae habuit, usque eo violentus actor et concitatus fuit, ut in media eius actione surgeret Vatinius reus et exclamaret: Rogo vos, iudices, num si iste disertus est, ideo me damnari oportet? Idem postea cum videret a clientibus Catonis, rei sui, ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... in full toilet prevails. When King entered the room the scene might well be called brilliant, and even bewildering, so that in the maze of beauty and the babble of talk he was glad to obtain the services of Mrs. Farquhar as cicerone. Between the rim of people near the walls and the elliptical centre was an open space for promenading, and in this beauty and its attendant cavalier went round and round in unending show. This is called the "tread-mill." But for the seriousness of this frank display, and the unflagging interest ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... regarded as a trustworthy expert. But the flagrant partiality of her latest book (Twenty Years of Balkan Tangle; London, 1920), which, moreover, is written with great bitterness, will make the public turn, I hope, to Sir Charles Eliot, who is a vastly better cicerone. The present ambassador in Japan is, of course, one of the foremost men of this generation. His Balkan studies are as supremely competent as his monumental work on British Nudibranchiate Mollusca, published by the Ray Society ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... asked to be their cicerone. It was a big place, and they might lose themselves; besides, he knew the best parts, because he had often come there with an artist, a very intelligent fellow from whom a large dealer bought designs to put on his cardboard boxes. Down below, when the wedding party entered the ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... surveyed the remains of antiquity at this place, accompanied by an illiterate fellow, as cicerone, who called himself a descendant of a cousin of Saint Columba, the founder of the religious establishment here. As I knew that many persons had already examined them, and as I saw Dr Johnson inspecting and measuring several of the ruins of which he has since given so full an account, my mind was ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... delighted with his role of cicerone, "it is necessary to be at home here! You should come here often! Nothing in the world can be more amusing. Here behind the scenes is a world by itself. One can see pretty little lasses springing up like asparagus. One sees running hither and ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... down on the "gilded domes"* of the churches, and bright green roofs of the houses, and far away, beyond these, the gently undulating country with the "Sparrow Hills," from which Napoleon is said, in cicerone language, to have "gazed upon the doomed city." Occasionally I walked about the bazaars in the hope of finding interesting specimens of genuine native art-industry, and was urgently invited to purchase every conceivable article which I did not want. At midday or in ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... circumstance that there was but a single aristocratic hotel in the place. He extracted this information from a small boy, begrimed with iron-dust, and looking as if he had just been cast at a neighboring foundry, who kindly acted as cicerone, and conducted the tired wayfarer to the doorstep of The Spread Eagle, under one of whose wings—to be at once figurative and literal—he was glad to nestle ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... ascended our hill, and resting awhile upon the summit, surveyed the prospect from that position. Then I conducted the party through some of our woodland walks, which Julia and myself had explored together. But I soon gave up the part of cicerone to Wharton, who was to the "MANOR BORN." He was a native of the neighborhood, boasted that he knew every "bosky dell of this wild wood" and certainly conducted us to glimpses of prettiest heights, and groves, and far vistas, where the light ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... over the mosques, laugh at portly Turks and dignified Sheykhs on their white donkeys, drink sherbet in the streets, ride wildly about on a donkey, peer under black veils at beautiful eyes and feel generally intoxicated! I am quite a good cicerone now of the glorious old city. Omar is in raptures at the idea that the Sidi el Kebir (the Great Master) might come, and still more if he brought the 'little master.' He plans meeting you on the steamboat and bringing you to me, that I may kiss your hand first of all. Mashallah! ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... been taken over by the different members of the Labour Council. The representative of each Trades Union had his own office, staff of clerks and private telephone. Fenn, who greeted the two men with a rather excessive cordiality, constituted himself their cicerone. He took them from room to room and waited while Julian exchanged remarks with some of the delegates whom he had ...
— The Devil's Paw • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pride in their church, which is attributed to Orcagna, and its possessions, among which come first the relief monuments of early Acciaioli in the floor of one of the chapels—the founder's being perhaps also the work of Orcagna, while that of his son Lorenzo, who died in 1353, is attributed by our cicerone to Donatello, but by others to an unknown hand. It is certainly very beautiful. These tombs are the very reverse of those which we saw in S. Croce; for those bear the obliterating traces of centuries of footsteps, so that some are nearly flat with the stones, whereas these have been ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... in the neat peasant dress of our country, when, taking a little from the fashion of the last century (the cap and the kerchief), it assumes no ungraceful costume,—replied to their summons. She was the solitary cicerone of the place. She had lived there, a lone and childless widow, for thirty years; and, of all the persons I have ever seen, would furnish forth the best heroine to one of those pictures of homely life which Wordsworth has dignified ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... proved to be Mr. Collard's, the owner of the house that we had just passed, and were really a very nice pack of harriers, consisting of seventeen or eighteen couple, kept in better style (as far as kennel appearance goes) than three-fourths of the harriers in England. Bird, the huntsman, our cicerone, seemed a regular keen one in hunting matters, and Jorrocks and he had a long confab about the "noble art of hunting," though the former was rather mortified to find on announcing himself as the "celebrated Mr. Jorrocks" that Bird had never ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... anecdotes of the "sullybrutted Dane," varied by times with an irrelative hiccough of his own, was no inapt type of the ordinary biographers of Swift. The skill with which long practice had enabled our cicerone to turn these involuntary hitches of his discourse into rhetorical flourishes, and well-nigh to make them seem a new kind of conjunction, would have been invaluable to the Dean's old servant Patrick, but in that sad ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... long been acknowledged to be the cicerone of Cupid; and accordingly the God of Wine introduced the God of Love into the bosom of the double-bass, who, with a commendable feeling of sociality, instantly invited the cook to join the party. Now Susan, though a staid woman, and weighing, moreover, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 30, 1841 • Various
... not exactly here, and please your Majesty," said the old Seneschal, stepping with the eager haste of a cicerone who shows the curiosities ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... stranger to his room. Distinguished guests we have had beneath the roof of St. Cuthbert's manse. We once had Major Pond, the great cicerone of great lecturers; he had brought Ian Maclaren to our town, who in turn brought the spring to all of us, beguiling moisture even ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... been here long?" asked Irene, accepting the proffered arm with alacrity, and submitting to be led away by her cicerone. ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... this respect, Henri met with an excellent cicerone in the person of the young ensign, who, by some act of indiscretion or another, had, in the little village in Flanders where we represented the personages in this tale as having halted for a moment, communicated the count's secret to the prince. This ensign had not quitted ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... will visit the cloister of Bramante, in the middle of which, sunk a few feet below the level, is built, on the identical place where St. Peter was crucified, a little temple, half Greek, half Christian; you will thence ascend by a side door into the church itself. There, the attentive cicerone will show you, in the first chapel to the right, the Christ Scourged, by Sebastian del Piombo, and in the third chapel to the left, an Entombment by Fiammingo; having examined these two masterpieces at leisure, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... learning; have shuddered at revisiting the spot I hastened down to examine, while curiosity was yet keen enough to make me venture a very dangerous and scarcely-trodden path to Neptune's Grotto; where, as you descend, the Cicerone shews you a wheel of some coarse carriage visibly stuck fast in the rock till it is become a part of it; distinguished from every other stone only by its shape, its projecting forward, and its shewing the hollow places in its ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... the journey in a comfortable carriage, so I accepted. We started the next morning, and reached Toledo in the evening of the same day. For Spain we were lodged comfortably enough, and the next day we went out under the charge of a cicerone, who took us to the Alcazar, the Louvre of Toledo, formerly the palace of the Moorish kings. Afterwards we inspected the cathedral, which is well worthy of a visit, on account of the riches it contains. I saw the great tabernacle used on Corpus Christi. It ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... kill me—"and, with lying speechless three days, I recovered upon my back in bed: the breach healed, and in a week after I got out." But the weakness which ensued, and the subsequent "hurrying about," no doubt as cicerone of Parisian sights to his wife and daughter, "made me think it high time to haste to Toulouse." Accordingly, about the 20th of the month, and "in the midst of such heats that the oldest Frenchman never ...
— Sterne • H.D. Traill
... kindly met on the pier by Mr. James Henderson, an elderly Scotchman, whom a long residence in Para, a bottomless fund of information, and a readiness to serve an Anglo-Saxon, have made an invaluable cicerone. We shot through the devious, narrow streets to the Hotel Diana, where we made our toilet, for our habiliments, too, had reached their ultima thule. As La Condamine said on his arrival at Quito: "Je me trouvai hors d'etat de ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... by the side of a low wall—in front of an old tower—presents itself to your attention. It was before breakfast that my companion and self visited this interesting interior, over every part of which we were conducted by a most loquacious cicerone, who spoke the French language very fluently, and who was pleased to express his extreme gratification upon finding that his visitors were Englishmen. The tower and the adjoining chapel, may be each of the thirteenth century; but the tombstone of the founder ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume V (of X) • Various
... in a hospitable mood. Beside her walked a little elderly man, tightly buttoned in a shabby black coat, but with a flower in his lappet, and a pair of soiled light gloves. He was a grotesque-looking personage, and might have passed for a gentleman of the old school, reduced by adversity to playing cicerone to foreigners of distinction. He had a little black eye which glittered like a diamond and rolled about like a ball of quicksilver, and a white moustache, cut short and stiff, like a worn-out brush. He was smiling with extreme urbanity, and talking in a low, mellifluous voice to the lady, who ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... bound for La Hourmerie, I ask you to observe that this precious elopement took place from that very spot, and that in the Chateau de la Hourmerie were staying those other unfortunates, now abandoned to their fate by the selfish passion of Madame for her cicerone turned paramour!" ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... the girl, a shade stiffly. This impassive young man, who seemed quite different from any one she had met in her Boston set, was a little out of her calculations. She knew it was unreasonable to expect Mr. Wintermuth himself to act as cicerone, but just the same she was not entirely certain that she did not resent being so definitely turned over to this youthfully unexpected substitute. Probably Mr. Otto Bartels would have been ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... and its Story for issue in the "Mediaeval Towns Series," opportunity has been taken of revising the whole and of adding a Second Part, wherein we have essayed the office of cicerone. ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... conclusion the industrial system of to-day. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph over Nature, but a triumph over Nature and the fellow-man. This, I must warn you, was my theory at the time. I had no convenient cicerone in the pattern of the Utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long since passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... over the grounds for a few moments, taking seats under the shadow of a tree, and make some inquiries as to the place itself, its extent, the course of culture, the description of manures used, etc. Our cicerone assents to the proposal, and proceeds to answer our general inquiries. Bloomsdale contains in round numbers four hundred acres; it has a frontage on the Delaware of upwards of a mile, is bounded on the west by the Delaware Canal, and is divided ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... Moreover, I knew my friends were in Vienna, and I had heard nothing from them. I should have hastened there immediately if there had been an opportunity of doing so; but I was obliged to wait till the next day, as the steamer did not start till then. I made arrangements to go by it, and then took a cicerone to show me all the objects of interest in the town, more for ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... Laetitia, to talk of himself and his plans: the project of a run to Italy. Enviable? Yes, but in England you live the higher moral life. Italy boasts of sensual beauty; the spiritual is yours. "I know Italy well; I have often wished to act as a cicerone to you there. As it is, I suppose I shall be with those who know the land as well as I do, and will not be particularly enthusiastic:—if you are what you were?" He was guilty of this perplexing twist ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 'Meeting of Bacchus with Ariadne,' or Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus from the Sea.' It may suffice to marvel at the slight effect which melodies so powerful and so direct as these produce upon the ordinary public. Sitting, as is my wont, one Sunday morning, opposite the 'Bacchus,' four Germans with a cicerone sauntered by. The subject was explained to them. They waited an appreciable space of time. Then the youngest opened his lips and spake: 'Bacchus war der Wein-Gott.' And they all moved heavily away. Bos locutus est. 'Bacchus was the wine-god!' This, apparently, is what a picture ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... him to act as cicerone to me until I was tired. He bowed, and I did not dispute the mandate, although I would rather have remained with her, and got to know something of the nature that lay behind those gray passionless features, than turn to the society of that smug-looking young gentleman ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... too narrow to be of the slightest avail against cannon, and even musketry. In the face of the rock a staircase is cut, by which you ascend to a door, of which the key is kept at a cottage close by, where dwells also your cicerone, or guide. The door being opened, you see before you a continuation of the rocky staircase; with this difference in character, however, between what is passed and what is to come,—that whereas you mounted to the threshold under the canopy of heaven, you ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... Urbino. His son Orazio was with him, and Duke Guidobaldo was himself his escort, and sent him on with a band of men-at-arms from Pesaro. He was received in Rome by Cardinal Bembo; Paul III. gave him a cordial welcome and Vasari was appointed his cicerone. It is interesting to inquire what impression Rome, with its treasures of antique statuary and contemporary painting, made upon Titian. "He is filled with wonder and glad that he came," writes Bembo. In a ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... Major Boyle of the Egyptian Army Staff as a "cicerone," on the long railway track from the sea to Atbara and Khartum, past scattered villages peopled by staring Fuzzy Wuzzies with erect and luxuriant black hair, and across hot stretches of desert and rock. At a quarter past eleven on the morning of the 2nd ...
— With Manchesters in the East • Gerald B. Hurst
... at their own poor jokes; and I was obliged to listen, sad and disgusted, to their empty and tasteless and misplaced flippancy. The young barefooted friar, with his dark lanthorn, and his black eyes flashing from under his cowl, who acted as our cicerone, was in picturesque unison with the scene; but—more than one murder having lately been committed among the labyrinthine recesses of the ruin, the government has given orders that every person entering after dusk should be attended ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... the bazar. He wore a scarlet cloak, richly embroidered with gold in the style of an English aid-de-camp's dress uniform. He was attended by a janissary attached to the English Embassy and by a cicerone: he appeared to be about twenty-two. His features were of so exquisite a delicacy, that one might almost have given him a feminine appearance, but for the manly expression of his fine blue eyes. ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... These lakes vary from thirty to forty miles in length, and by means of steamboats form an easy communication, though a more tedious one than the railways, between this and the southern part of the State of New York. We had a capital cicerone to explain all that we saw as we went along, in a Yankee, who told us he was "raised" in these parts, though he lived in "Virginny." He looked like a small farmer, but had a countenance of the keenest ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... cicerone took me into the main building, filled up to the brim with what seemed to be little brick and stone boxes, and, halting in front of one, said, "This is your cell." Looking around to see if it was safe ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... Athenian inn, who had a very elegant appearance, appealed to us to confirm the Graecia mendax, saying, he had just returned from Marathon, and his guide had been telling him far greater lies than he ever heard from an Italian cicerone. "The fellow had the impudence to say, that his countrymen had defeated 500,000 Persians in the plain he showed me," said the gentleman in green. "Let alone the number—that fable might be pardoned—but he thought me such an egregious ass as not to know that the war was with the Turks, and ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... concerned, even ever so little, in painting the roof of Milan Cathedral within to represent carved stone- work. Of this famous roof every one has heard—how good it is, how bad, how perfect a delusion, how transparent an artifice. It is the first thing your cicerone shows you on entering the church. The occasionally accommodating art-lover may accept it philosophically, I think; for the interior, though admirably effective as a whole, has no great sublimity, nor even ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... than as a host. When he had placed his guests comfortably in the living-room he told them the story of the building of the house. Then he made a cicerone of himself, and explained, with running comments, each feature of his plan as he showed how it had been carried out through the various rooms. Surprised at the attractiveness of things, Dicksie found herself making mental notes for her own use, and began asking questions. Sinclair ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... unpleasant reminiscences about Lady Jane Grey, Mauger, and other historic characters. The struggling bird is then beheaded, and stripped of his plumage almost before his pulses have ceased to beat. The first occasion on which I saw one of these executions, I could not help thinking of a certain cicerone at Rome, who, albeit that he spoke very good French and Italian, always broke out in English when he saw a picture of a martyrdom of any kind soever; 'That one very good man, cut his head off.' The man had but one idea of death, and the same may be said of these primitive ...
— Herzegovina - Or, Omer Pacha and the Christian Rebels • George Arbuthnot
... in the pleasant Cemetery at Bologna, I found myself walking next Sunday morning, among the stately marble tombs and colonnades, in company with a crowd of Peasants, and escorted by a little Cicerone of that town, who was excessively anxious for the honour of the place, and most solicitous to divert my attention from the bad monuments: whereas he was never tired of extolling the good ones. Seeing this ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... found the ceremony was not to take place for an hour, and we had therefore time to make acquaintance with the interior of the works. An intelligent foreman acted as cicerone, and performed the duties with ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 462 - Volume 18, New Series, November 6, 1852 • Various
... enormous chimneys, soared into the bright blue air. The place was empty and silent; shadows of gargoyles, of extraordinary projections, were thrown across the clear grey surfaces. One felt that the whole thing was monstrous. A cicerone appeared, a languid young man in a rather shabby livery, and led me about with a mixture of the impatient and the desultory, of condescension and humility. I do not profess to understand the plan of Chambord, ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... years after this, Major Moor (as I also heard him relate) was among the usual company going over one of the Royal Palaces—Windsor, I think—when the cicerone pointed out a fragment of the Royal George's mast, whereupon one elderly gentleman of the party told them that he had witnessed the disaster; after which Major Moor capped the general amazement by informing the little party that they ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... Paris, she was compelled to wait for one day on account of some want of connection in the trains for Marseilles. Gualtier acted as cicerone, and accompanied her in a carriage through the chief streets, through the Place de la Concorde, the Champs Elysees, and the Bois de Boulogne. She was sufficiently herself to experience delight in spite of her impatience, and to feel ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... the Emu plains. The noble animals, imported from England, had not degenerated in New South Wales; they were still full of spirit as one of the young officers found to his cost, when, as he was saying in English to Sir John Cox, acting as cicerone to the party, "I do love this riding exercise," he was suddenly thrown over his horse's head and deposited on the grass before he knew where he was. The laugh against him was all the more hearty as the skilful horseman was ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... "monuments," French guide-books confine themselves to facts, and the adjectives "fine" and "remarkable"; they are almost always strictly impersonal, and the traveller who uses them as a cicerone, has a sense of unexpected discovery, a peculiar elation, in finding a monument of rare beauty; but he is never subjected to that disappointed irritation which comes when one stands before the "monument" and feels that one's ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... the world held! Had it not been for his fear of betraying undue ignorance, he would have broken into a torrent of questions; as it was, he sat in wide-eyed silence, gazing about him like a savage suddenly transported into the world of civilization—not a little to the amusement of his cicerone. ...
— Tom Tufton's Travels • Evelyn Everett-Green
... come on shore, had indeed sent for him. Without waiting to consider, and without further explanation, he accompanied the strange guide, who led the way to the wharf. The flags were floating free and gay, yet as this nameless cicerone pointed out the Tigress, that lay before them with flag staff bare, Emile Le Grande thought, "The captain is afraid to show his colors; well he ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... in all that is shown by our amicable cicerone, save, perhaps, Don Manuel and his inamorata, who occasionally loiter behind congenial cogwheels, huge coolers, clarifying pans, and other objects used in the process of sugar-making. The attachment which the lovers conceive for this particular portion ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... attended upon me as cicerone, boasted with some degree of exultation of a triumph of his countrymen over the stern regulations of the place. During the time that Holland was overrun by the armies of the French republic, a French general, surrounded by his whole etat major, who had ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... Bangkok; to his late Royal Highness the Crown Prince of Siam; to his Serene Highness Prince Traidos Prabandh, Siamese Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs; to his Serene Highness Colonel Prince Amoradhat, Chief of Intelligence of the Siamese Army, who constituted himself my guide and cicerone during our stay in his country; to the French Resident-Superior at Pnom-Penh; and to the other French officials who aided me during my travels in Indo-China. His Excellency J. J. Jusserand, French Ambassador at Washington and ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... exponent, explainer; demonstrator. scholiast, commentator, annotator; metaphrast[obs3], paraphrast[obs3]; glossarist[obs3], prolocutor. spokesman, speaker, mouthpiece. dragoman, courier, valet de place, cicerone, showman; oneirocritic[obs3]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... amiable in you, my dear Dorothea," said Mr. Casaubon, not in the least noticing that she was hurt; "but if you had a lady as your companion, I could put you both under the care of a cicerone, and we could thus achieve two purposes in ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... on one side and his fair preserver on the other. The two talk as much together during meals as etiquette allows, and perhaps a little more. Then, as the Emperor has been often at Lyndalberg, he can act as cicerone for a stranger. He has shown Miss Mowbray all the beauties of the place. He gathers her roses in the rose garden; he has guided her through the grottoes. He has piloted her through the labyrinth; he has told her which are the best dogs in the kennels; and has ...
— The Princess Virginia • C. N. Williamson
... be if fairly let out!" she said. "But we will not waste the precious moments, but turn our eyes about us in quest of the belles. Grace, you who are so much at home, must be our cicerone, and tell us which are the idols we ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... on the walls is perhaps a trifle more ragged, the old oak panels not blacker—that were impossible—but a trifle more worm-eaten; it is the same room. I must have seemed a sad boor to my polite cicerone as I stood, hat in hand, and silently took in all the old familiar details. The same smell of mildewed antiquity, I could almost believe the same furniture. And indeed my host tells me that he took over the house as it was, and that some of the chairs and tables are scarcely more youthful ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... generation, some peaceful desert of literature as yet unclaimed by the crammer or the coach; where it might be possible for the student to wander, even perhaps to stray, at his own pleasure without finding every beauty labeled, every difficulty engineered, every nook surveyed, and a professional cicerone standing at every corner to guide each succeeding traveler along the same well-worn round. If such a wish were granted, I would further ask that the domain of knowledge thus "neutralized" should be the literature of our own country. I grant ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... seedy Quinson, black sheep of an excellent family, was glad to brighten up his tarnished career as the cicerone of so brilliant a butterfly, and only too proud to be the means of introducing Germain to the young bloods of the city. At the end of the week, when departing, Lecour gave a banquet, to which he invited all the choicest spirits, and having brought ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... cicerone, had contrived to learn a little of the difficult Burmese language, and knew the town to a certain extent—including something of the vast underworld, and even FitzGerald admitted that "old man Roscoe" could tell a thing or two, ...
— The Road to Mandalay - A Tale of Burma • B. M. Croker
... heart succeeding so rapidly the dark gloom of my despairing thoughts, buoyed me up, and while I whispered to myself, "all may not yet be lost," I summoned my best energies to my aid. Luckily for me, I was better qualified to act as cicerone in a gallery than as a guide in a green-house; and with the confidence that knowledge of a subject ever inspires, I rattled away about art and artists, greatly to the edification of Lady Callonby—much to the surprise of Lady Catherine—and, ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... was induced to saunter into the Turkish quarter of the town, where all wore the handsome holyday dresses of the old fashion, being mostly of crimson cloth, edged with gold lace. My cicerone, a Servian, pointed out those shops belonging to the sultan, still marked with the letter f, intended, I suppose, for mulk or imperial property. We then turned to the left, and came into a singular looking street, ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... journey Miss Suffern's communications grew more and more amazing. She was like a cicerone preparing the mind of an inexperienced traveller for the marvels about to burst ...
— Autres Temps... - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... picturesque, but the most helpless and inconclusive cicerone I ever knew; and while his long, hooked Hebrew nose caught my idle fancy, and his soft blue eyes excused a great deal of inefficiency, the aimless fashion in which he mounted dirty staircases for the keys of the synagogue, and came down without them, ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... the upper floor, used now as a council chamber, contains four interesting dessus de porte painted here by Watteau. The subjects are scriptural, of course; but as, in spite of all her efforts, the obliging damsel who acted as our cicerone could not possibly manage the blinds and sashes of the lofty window in the octagonal room which they adorn, it was impossible to make out to what period of the artist's career they belong. Upon one of them—the 'Woman taken in Adultery'—we got light enough thrown to show that its ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert |
