The seventh chapter explores the developing aesthetic value now attached to Rome’s ruins, tracing for instance the way in which they move up scale from illustrations in books or in the background staffage of Renaissance painting to become the foregrounded subject matter in the paintings of the Baroque era and especially the eighteenth century. Engraved views, vedute and photographs provided tourists with inexpensive and portable souvenirs. The ruins have by now acquired full aesthetic validation as the principal subject matter of paintings by Claude or in the engravings of Piranesi. Thanks to the aesthetic appreciation of the ruins, images of them become common features of interior decoration.

The emergence of a ruin-aesthetic comes after Petrarch, and is initially owed to architects like Brunelleschi and to painters like Raphael. Architects wanted to build in the Roman manner, all’antica, and painters introduced Roman ruins into the background of their pictures. Such was the commitment to the study and imitation of the Roman style that the need to conserve the ruins was recognised and advocated. Hitherto it had never occurred to anyone anywhere to urge that a ruined structure should be preserved for its historical value. But a further value was now attached to the ruins of Rome, namely the aesthetic: the ruins were looked upon as attractive in themselves. The ruins also became the object of study and analysis by a new breed of scholar, the antiquarian and topographer, such as Flavio Biondo, who also wanted to ensure their preservation for future ages to admire. This is a new feature of ruin-mindedness: whatever is deemed beautiful must be preserved for later generations to study and admire and imitate. Since those later generations will include foreign visitors, tourism comes to be recognised as a sound economic reason for conserving the handsome material remains of ancient Rome.

Conservation is a fundamental feature of true ruin-mindedness, but the early attempts to preserve the ruins of Rome were unsuccessful until the tourism of the eighteenth century made it clear that there was an economic benefit to the preservation and attractive presentation of the city’s ruins. Once this was appreciated, care for the preservation of the ruins from further damage and decay became an issue. Towards the end of that century, soil and rubble were removed from the bases of a number of the more significant ruins, and steps were taken to isolate them so as to protect them from harm, an innovative measure. Rome took the lead in guarding the heritage of its built environment. But since no one had ever tried to protect a building out of doors before, novel means of preservation and even of conservation and rebuilding were devised to ensure that the ruins looked their best for visitors and for posterity. Further projects of excavation were undertaken by the French and the Kingdom of Italy in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century the ruins were furbished up for propaganda purposes by the Fascist regime.

The second chapter accounts for the steady ruination of Rome despite attempts at maintenance of the built environment in late antiquity. Fire, earthquake and flood were the chief agents of destruction. Repairs were always needed but became increasingly rare thanks to depopulation and diminishing public revenue. The shift of secular power to Constantinople and the gradual decay of paganism in the face of buoyant Christianity did the public buildings of Rome, especially the temples and places of entertainment, no favours. Stone from such structures began to be recycled for repairs or for the adornment of new buildings, such as churches. Depopulation emptied large sectors of the city within the Aurelian walls, and the abandoned sites were turned into farms and vineyards.

True ruin-mindedness begins with the poet Petrarch, the subject along with his successors of the fourth chapter. He was the first person we know of who visited Rome with the intention of seeing the ruins. Thanks to his unrivalled knowledge of Latin literature, he viewed the ruins as ‘sites of memory’, complementary to and made comprehensible by the texts of Roman poets and historians. For Petrarch and his successors, the ruins became an essential part of the historical and cultural heritage of the ancient Romans, a material complement to the history of Livy and the poetry of Virgil. Such complementarity was crucial to endowing the ruins with some context and meaning; they were not just piles of broken rubble but a valuable part of the Roman cultural achievement as a whole. Petrarch’s enthusiasm was infectious and it can be claimed that he initiated two new disciplines, urban topography and antiquarianism, the subjects of the next two chapters, 5 and 6. From this point on, progression will be largely chronological, as the sentiment of ruin-mindedness is developed and enlarged.

This chapter brings together literary responses to the ruins of Rome. Over the centuries after Petrarch, the ruins had acquired historical, cultural and aesthetic validation, all the outcome of the development of a sentiment favourable to ruination; in short, ruin-mindedness. For an emotional validation we must turn to writers, who put into plain words how they felt about the ruins. The feelings are surprisingly various: sometimes elation, sometimes moral disgust. Whatever the reaction, it is usually founded, as was Petrarch’s, on the fact that the ruins of Rome have a historical and cultural context, thanks to the survival of Latin literature. The physical remains of the ancient city are given meaning by the Roman literary heritage, and it is that above all which enables writers to record a varied range of nuanced responses to them that are not likely to be evoked by a ruin without a history. Reactions to the ruins are affected by shifts in sensibility, especially the influence of romanticism, which insisted upon recording impressions of the ruins in moonlight. The ruins of Rome are signs to be interpreted in endless ways. This cannot be said of any other ruins anywhere.

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.