In her minor classic, Pleasure of Ruins (1953), Rose Macaulay coined the phrase “ruin-mindedness” to describe an aesthetic sensibility familiar to travelers——and readers and writers of travel-literature—for some centuries now: a sentimental attraction to ruins as poignant, elegiac things redolent of both past grandeur and time’s inevitable ravaging of the loftiest human achievements. This perspective … Continue reading The ruins of Rome: a cultural history