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 for ever.
It took Ruskin almost half a million words to launch his devastating attack on the Renaissance – ‘the school which has conducted men’s inventive and constructional faculties from the Grand Canal to Gower Street’ 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 20th century, designed this abridgement to convey all the excitement, urgency, love of Venice and unmatchedly beautiful prose to a new generation of readers.