twenty-lira

Updated: May 28, 2025

Here is this dry-looking archaeological museum, with antipathetic custodians at the door who refuse to get change for twenty-lira pieces: nothing could be more unpromising than they or their building; and yet you find yourself instantly among countless vestiges of a past people who had risen to power and crumbled again before Christ was born but at a time when man was so vastly more sensitive to beauty than he now is that every appliance for daily life was the work of an artist.

E. V. (Edward Verrall) Lucas - A Wanderer in Florence