Mark Twain response

Italian government: squandering their funds, violating of the church, incompetent
Italian churches: overly decadent, juxtaposition between great riches inside and starving poor outside
Duomo: unnecessary, taking precious resources from the people in Florence, over-praised
Medicis: wasteful, flamboyant, wrapped up in material things, overly confident about their importance
“Masters” aka talented artists of the Renaissance: mindless servants of their patrons, dependent on patrons
Dominican friars: having the façade of being completely pious while simultaneously commandeering the Inquisition and its horrible acts
Civitavecchia: dirty, disgusting, having lazy and ignorant inhabitants, unworthy of even a patron saint
Papal States: having an incompetent bureaucracy, archaic and un-advanced
Romans: slothful, superstitious, ignorant, provincial, poorly dressed, having a corrupt church system, unsophisticated, prejudiced

St. Peter’s: bulky, unattractive, overly huge without being impressive
The Inquisition: hypocritical, barbaric
Ancient Roman entertainment at the Coliseum: barbaric, fruitless, over-hyped
Italian obsession with Michelangelo: excessive, exaggerated, unnecessary
European guides: a necessary evil, unintelligible, not knowledgeable – instead, just reciting facts, praise-seekers

Humorous quotes:

-“And now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse everybody I can think of.”

-“And now- However another beggar approaches. I will go out and destroy him and then come back and write another chapter of vituperation.”
[Vituperation means “verbal abuse or castigation; violent denunciation or condemnation” – it is shocking and humorous that he is describing himself so harshly as well]

-“One of these fat barefooted rascals” – in reference to Dominican friars

-“I suppose it will be sent up and filed away among the criminal archives of Rome, and will always be regarded as a mysterious infernal machine which would have blown up like a mine and scattered the good Pope all around but for a miraculous providential interference.”

-“Butchered to make a Roman holiday sounds well for the first seventeen or eighteen hundred thousand times one sees it in print, but after that it begins to grow tiresome.”

-“In Florence he painted everything, designed everything nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone.”

Twain uses shocking and blunt language and phrases that the reader wouldn’t expect. It surprises you in its harshness and forces you to consider the truth behind his words, although it might not be to the extent he conveys. He also uses a lot of sarcasm, which mocks his subjects in a more subtle, intelligent fashion rather than outright insulting them (though he does a great deal of that too).