Despite increasing dilapidation, many of Rome’s ancient buildings survived in a form to impress visitors. During the Middle Ages a number of them – Hildebert of Lavardin, Master Gregorius, Benjamin of Tudela – left a brief record of the favourable impression the ruins made upon them. More widespread, however, were the legendary accounts, as found most extensively in the Mirabilia Urbis Romae, of the history and function of a number of the ruins of the pagan past. Such fables can be seen as forerunners of later ruin-mindedness in their attempt to explain the original role in the urban fabric of what was now ruinous and puzzling.

The eighth chapter pursues the urge among artists to imaginatively reconstruct the original structures that became ruins, and not just of individual buildings but of the whole ancient city. Reconstructions are to be seen in two-dimensional ‘flat’ art (paintings, drawings, watercolours, engravings, panoramas) and in three-dimensional architectural models. These occasionally inspired the erection of modern buildings which realised the reconstructed image. Modern reconstructions employ digital and computer-generated imagery. In the twentieth century three-dimensional models of ancient Rome were constructed, and imaginative visions of Rome were devised for cinema and television.

The first chapter presents evidence in support of the claim that an interest in ruins was never widespread. It had to begin somewhere and at some time. There had also to be certain factors, which are set out in the chapter, that facilitated the interest. The main evidence for a lack of interest in ruins is seen in the motives for tourism in ancient Greece and Rome – indeed, tourism is one of the leading themes of the whole work. The indifference of the Greeks and Romans to ruins is also found in other cultures, notably China’s. What seems to be needed for the ruins of any culture to arouse interest and to make a favourable impression is a gap in the continuity of that culture, such as occurred in Roman culture from late antiquity to the early Middle Ages in Europe. Someone aiming to bridge that gap – a tourist, say – who surveys past Roman culture with a sympathetic eye and an understanding of its achievements is in a position to find the ruins, the material remains of Roman culture, as interesting as any of its other monuments.

Such was the aesthetic appeal of a Roman ruin that English grand tourists began to decorate their parkland back home, now landscaped in a sort of ‘faux-naturalism’, with sham ruins. The eighteenth-century fashion for the English garden swept over continental Europe, and many gardens, surprisingly even in Rome itself, have sham Roman ruins after the English fashion. The fashion for sham ‘Roman’ ruins continued into the twentieth century and was extended to the United States and Japan.

The chief interest of the antiquarian in Rome’s ruins was topographical, identifying them if possible with structures known and described in Latin literature. Attempts to picture the layout of the ancient city generated numerous maps and disquisitions, which gradually morphed into guidebooks for tourists, many of which focussed on only the ancient remains to the exclusion of the modern city. The development of tourism is one of the capital outcomes of the fascination with the ruins of Rome. There does not seem to have been any other city or site in the world that was visited for the sake of its ruins. Topographical studies were, however, hampered by their reliance on more (or in one case, less) ancient texts in which buildings and their locations were mentioned, not always reliably. It became clear in due course that the only way forward lay in archaeological excavation.

Petrarch initiated ruin-tourism, and that flowered in the period of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. Arguably, the ruins of Rome were the first to generate the production of a considerable variety of souvenirs, portable objects manufactured expressly for visitors to take away. Now a souvenir is only desirable if the object it represents is deemed attractive: the ruin-aesthetic was so well established by the time of the Grand Tour that ruins moved from the background of paintings into the foreground; they became the subject. In the engravings of Piranesi the ruins of Rome reached their peak of aesthetic appeal. The aesthetic validation of ruins is to the fore, since the English decorated the interiors of their houses with scenes of ruination. They also brought home architectural models of ruins in cork or marble for display; their porcelain and fans were decorated with ruin motifs.