Excerpt from Tchay and Chianti: Or Wanderings in Russia and ItalyWho would expect in Moscow to see Lom bard fourteenth-century walls or Italian brick mouldings? Or, again, to find masterpieces of such painters as Raphael and Fra Sebastiano del Piombo, and collections of Gubbio, Urbino. And Castel Durante wares? In this way, it is true, there is perhaps no country in Europe which could not be found directly in relation to that Italy whose amazing genius has provided spacious banquets of intellectual sweets for all the world. For apart from the scattered and travelled treasures of her native princes, her in¿uence is seen and felt in a thousand unsuspected ways. Even Russia, backward as she still is, used three hundred years ago to invite North Italian artists to work for her in her capital cities.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.