Just Finished Reading: In Ruins by Christopher Woodward (FP: 2001)

It all started, as many things do, with Rome. Often used as the end point of the European elites travels the city and its many ruins became an important part of the cultural heritage of generations of young, rich men and (occasionally) women as they ‘finished’ their education in style. Being the kind of people they were – rich and acquisitive – they sometimes brought more than memories back with them and were not above plundering what would today be considered priceless relics of a bygone age. Such objects – apart from the controversial ‘Elgin’ marbles – included complete Roman columns and statues. Other, maybe poorer or less openly covetous, restricted themselves to copying (or embellishing) the ruins before them in paint, poetry or Romantic prose. But at some point it all followed them back home to France, Germany and particularly England where the ruins themselves were re-created (and embellished again) in planned landscaped gardens or exhibited in galleries. Not surprisingly ruins became ‘all the rage’ in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, so much so that some landowners started to create their own ‘ruins’ from scratch for the amusement of friends and guests to their estates. Others, the poets, artists and authors, imagined their own civilisation in ruins drawing inspiration from Roman and Greek architecture and, after Napoleons time in Egypt, the Pharaonic ruins inspired ever greater examples and homages to ruination. Oddly the craze for ruins, and the money that could be made from them, prompted authorities in Rome and other ancient cities across Europe and North Africa to ‘clean up’ their acts to make them more ‘tourist’ friendly ruining, some said, the ambience they had come to see. Such acts as clearing the Forum in Rome of overgrown vegetation as well as the local population of goat herders probably saved a great many of remains we now fly across the world to see as well as a great number of statues that were, until that point, being fed into furnaces to create lime for cement – I kid you not!

This is, to be honest, a very strange little book. Not directly about the ruins themselves – this is no work of architectural archaeology – but about the cultural impact and fascination with ruins and ruin. The fascination took hold, rather ironically, during the very heights of European civilisation and probably reflected some deep seated fear (or hope?) that if countries such as France and England were the inheritors of Rome then they were also the inheritors of Rome’s eventual decline and ultimate fall. No doubt this produced a suitably Romantic frisson and feeling of nostalgia for a future than had yet to come to pass. Told with a range of examples from ornamental garden design (on a grand scale!), art, poetry and prose this was an intriguing look at some of the darker sides and darker dreams of the 18^th and 19^th century. Recommended for an insightful ‘off the wall’ read.