"Of the many foreign travellers who have written about Venice there is none to surpass John Ruskin, the great nineteenth century writer, artist and critic, whose massive three-volume work The Stones of Venice (1851-3) remains one of the most influential books on art and architecture ever written." "Sarah Quill has compiled an illustrated guide to The Stones of Venice, linking Ruskin's descriptions of individual buildings with a contemporary photographic record of the architecture and sculpture as it is seen today. This abridgement excludes interiors and paintings, concentrating on the exterior architecture sculpture of Venice, all of which may be seen from the street or from the water without entering a building. Much of Ruskin's splendid prose is reproduced, together with many of his drawings and watercolours and a number of nineteenth-century engravings of the period. More than 200 photographs taken by Sarah Quill during the last years of the twentieth century identify the details described by Ruskin and show the extent to which the city's architecture has survived, or changed, since publication of The Stones of Venice 150 years before."--Jacket.