People of far greater importance than Don Abbondio have more than once found themselves in situations so unpleasant, and been so uncertain what to do next, that they have found the best expedient was to take to their beds with a fever.
È accaduto più d'una volta a personaggi di ben più alto affare che don Abbondio, di trovarsi in frangenti così fastidiosi, in tanta incertezza di partiti, che parve loro un ottimo ripiego mettersi a letto con la febbre.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Wednesday, January 06, 2016
A Solution to Pressing Problems
Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873), I Promessi Sposi, chapter II (tr. Archibald Colquhoun):