the anti-heroine of an era of bathtub gin, organized crime, and jazz, clouded in the smoke of fired guns and cigarettes.
In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.
In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

— Orson Welles, The Third Man


@темы: with serpents for arms the lovers are the hydra of the tale