Daily Inspiration Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster’s Italy is never just a place; it’s a moral weather system. “Love and understand the Italians” sounds like benevolent advice to the traveler, but the real target is the English reader who arrives armed with aesthetic hunger and colonial reflexes. The line flips the usual Grand Tour hierarchy: landscape and ruins as the main event, locals as scenery. Forster insists the reverse. The “land” can be devoured as postcard beauty, but “the people” demand the harder work of attention, empathy, and the surrender of superiority.

The phrasing does something sly. “Love and understand” is not “admire” or “study.” It’s intimate, almost domestic language, pushing against the tourist gaze. And “more marvellous” is pointedly comparative: Italy’s famous assets - art, light, antiquity - are demoted in favor of living human complexity. He’s praising Italians, yes, but also warning that they won’t behave like museum exhibits for British consumption.

Context matters. Forster wrote in an era when Italy functioned as a permissive fantasy for Northern Europeans: sensual, chaotic, emotionally “real,” safely other. His fiction often stages the English abroad as spiritually undernourished, trapped in propriety, then shaken awake by encounters that don’t flatter their self-image. This sentence carries that whole Forster project in miniature: travel as an ethical test, not a cultural shopping trip. The marvel isn’t the vista; it’s what happens when you stop using a country to decorate your own narrative.