Land of giants

I can’t remember who wrote it, Byron, Shelley, or Trelawny, about living in Italy that the cities, with their magnificent churches and palaces, their campaniles and triumphant arches, could not possibly have been built by Italians. Italians, this writer wrote, seemed a nation of degenerate dwarves living in the ruins of a magnificent country built by a nation of giants who had once inhabited this land; giants to which the modern dwarves cannot possibly be even most remotely related.