Venice, 6th May 1841.

Ruskin is 20, he has tuberculosis and is in Italy with his parents to cure himself. Thank God I’m here, he writes in his diary. Venice, for him, is a paradise among cities.

His visceral love of the lagoon city is to last all his life. To the extent that Venice will become – for the English poet for Proust after him – the symbol of an aesthetic attitude, of political and religious leanings.

Stones of Venice is still an extraordinarily effective guide to the city. But it’s also one of the finest examples of 19th century prose – vibrantly engaging. At the same time it’s a seminal work in the history of architecture and still has things to say to us about the industrial age; it’s an extraordinary cry of warning (half utopia, half apocalypse) that Ruskin addresses through this city to the whole world. In the prophetic words that open the book, Ruskin tells the reader he wants to preserve an image of Venice “before it’s lost forever ". “Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands: the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the First of these great powers only the memory remains; of the Second, the ruin; the Third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction . . . I would endeavour to . . . record, as far as I may, the warning which seems to me to be uttered by every one of the fast-gaining waves, that beat like passing bells, against the Stones of Venice.

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice”.