This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The theme of Roland Mayer’s informative and attractive volume is bound to evoke Pleasure of Ruins, Rose Macaulay’s 1953 classic in which the notion of “ruin-mindedness” is explored from ancient times to the 20th century. Macaulay expressed the enduring fascination felt for architectural remains across centuries, examining how aesthetic and emotional responses to ruins reflect deeper contemplations of mortality, time and the sublime. Mayer selects a smaller topographical canvas, that of Rome, and gives a broad and thorough account of that most long-lived and insistent focus of reflection on ruins.
His starting point is that an enthusiasm for ruins is far from universal. He cites the research of Salvatore Settis, which shows that few cultures set store by the idea of ruined buildings (the over-citation of secondary sources in some chapters reads like a vestige of their origins as lectures). Most civilisations have prioritized restoration over the romanticisation of decay, viewing ruins as problems to solve rather than objects of contemplation.
The ancient Romans themselves showed little interest in ruins per se; they were only keen on visiting abandoned sites such as Troy because of their significance in literary culture. The Romans generally showed greater interest in reconstructing structures damaged structures by fire, floods and earthquakes: “Rome was not ruined in a day,” as Mayer wittily notes.
When lightning destroyed the wooden upper tier of the Colosseum in 217 AD, it was restored over the course of five years. Following earthquakes in 847 and 1349, however, the final blow to the building was an earthquake in 1703 which brought down vast amounts of rubble and stone that were recycled as spolia in other building projects. The recycling of stone, brick and marble from ruined buildings has been documented as early as the 1st century — it made economic sense to reuse building materials.
From the 12th century on, hundreds of Mirabilia (books of wonders) were produced, listing and describing Rome’s historic monuments. Once thought to be guidebooks for pilgrims, many demonstrate historical ignorance or creative misreadings of Roman ruins. The Colosseum was invested with spurious religious significance — it was said to have been a Temple of the Sun. The Mirabilia represent a distinctive way of seeing ruins, not as faithful historical documents but as malleable symbols awaiting reinterpretation. However, they unwittingly served the purpose of preserving the memory and physical status of lost buildings.
Medieval Romans were happy to repurpose ancient structures as sources of building materials until the Renaissance ushered in a renewed appreciation for studying and conserving classical architectural forms. Meanwhile, “modern Rome needed stone for bridges, walls, aqueducts, churches and palaces”. Successive generations attempted to reconcile practical urban needs with an increasing reverence for pagan antiquity.
A distinguished literary classicist, Mayer is aware of the inevitable comparison between ruins and the fragmentary remains of ancient texts. As he explains:
Textual critics of classical literature are occasionally confronted by manifest defects in the manuscript tradition … It is part of the critic’s task to propose restoration of the missing elements by conjecture. It should come as no surprise, then, that students of the material remains of Rome also turned to conjectural restoration of the fragments of classical architecture.
Restoration efforts reflected evolving attitudes toward Rome’s pagan past, with ruined buildings becoming the sites of competing historical narratives. Papal restoration projects balanced Christian symbolism with classical aesthetics, often repurposing ancient structures for religious purposes. Pope Nicholas V (1447–55) “plundered” the Colosseum and other structures for the reconstruction of the Vatican and Lateran palaces.
For Renaissance artists, ruins could inform innovation rather than merely inspire nostalgia
Renaissance artists, however, approached ruins to learn from them. Architects such as Brunelleschi measured, sketched and analysed ancient structures to extract mathematical principles, initiating a dialogue between past and present that would transform European architecture. Brunelleschi’s dome for Florence Cathedral, taking its inspiration from the Pantheon, demonstrated how ruins could inform innovation rather than merely inspire nostalgia.
The poet Petrarch’s contemplation of Rome’s ruins marks a pivotal moment in the Western relationship with the ancient past: his melancholic reflections established a new mode of experiencing ruins as a stimulus for meditations on glory, impermanence and cultural memory. His letter describing how he climbed the Colosseum to gaze upon the city’s scattered ruins offered a template for the educated tourist’s experience.
The Petrarchan perspective laid the groundwork for the Grand Tour, the fashionable journeys undertaken by Northern Europeans to commune with Rome’s ruins — which became portals to philosophical contemplation. In one chapter (richly illustrated in colour, as is the case throughout), Mayer presents what he calls “the most engaging manifestation of ruin-mania … in the English garden of the eighteenth century”, at Stowe, Kew Gardens, Pitzhanger Manor and others.
The fashion for erecting “sham ruins” was subsequently adopted on aristocratic estates in Poland and Russia, as well as in France, Germany and Italy itself. Rose Macaulay’s friend, the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, found this exasperating, saying of Rose’s project: “She’s writing not only about ruins but about things people built to look like ruins. I don’t know what she sees in them.”
The 20th century brought a greater scholarly and historical concern for ruins, but that concern was not devoid of political overtones. The fascist regime of Mussolini had a complex relationship with Rome’s imperial remains: it systematically excavated, restored and sometimes reconstructed ancient monuments to create visual links between ancient Roman glory and modern fascist ambitions.
Projects such as clearing medieval structures around the Mausoleum of Augustus and the creation of the Via dell’Impero (Via dei Fori Imperiali) revealed ancient forums that encouraged ideologically charged assertions of continuity between the ancient empire and the modern state.
These varying approaches to architectural fragments — from practical reuse to romantic contemplation, from analytical study to political appropriation — reflect on the viewers of the ruins no less than on the ruins themselves. Mayer’s accessible scholarly tour demonstrates how Rome’s ruins track changing attitudes toward history, religion, aesthetics and politics over the ages. The ruins of Rome emerge not just as a physical landscape but as an intellectual one within which Western culture has repeatedly redefined its relationship to history.
