In my opinion, the form Italian beauty took, and the reason of
the feeling one had in Italy of wading in beauty, whereas one hardly
ever saw anything in the strict sense of the word beautiful in
Copenhagen, and rarely in Paris, was, that this beauty was the beauty of
the significant. All these women looked to be unoppressed, fullblown,
freely developed. All that makes woman ugly in the North: the cold, the
thick, ugly clothes that the peasant women wear, the doublet of
embarrassment and vapidity which they drag about with them, the strait-
waistcoat of Christiansfeldt morality in which they are confined by the
priests, by protestantism, by fashion, by custom and convention--none of
this oppressed, confined or contracted women here. These young peasant
girls looked as if they had never heard such words as "You must not," or
"You shall not," and as here in Italy there is none of the would-be
witty talk, the grinning behind people's backs, which takes the life out
of all intrepidity in the North, no one thought: "What will people say?"
Everyone dressed and deported himself with complete originality, as he,
or rather as she, liked. Hence eyes were doubly brilliant, blood coursed
twice as red, the women's busts were twice as rounded and full.
IV
From this time forth I had a strange experience.
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