Synopses & Reviews
The Stones of Venice has been described as the greatest guidebook ever written. Read by all who went there and thousands who did not, it opened Victorian eyes to the glories of a city even then under threat, and transformed the study and practice of architecture forever. It took Ruskin almost half a million words to launch this devastating attack on the Renaissance, and to explain how to see and make true architecture. They were "glorious words, but too many, " as J.G. Links put it while preparing this edition. Links, himself the greatest exponent of Venice of the 20"th" century, designed this abridgement to convey all the excitement, urgency, and love of Venice to a new generation of readers.