Pleasure of Ruins by Rose Macaulay

Softcover. Condition: Very Good. 1984. Thames and Hudson. Illustrated.

What is it that draws thousands of tourists every year to Mexico, to Egypt, to Greece and places all over the world just to look at ruined heaps of stone, the relics of some glamorous but fallen civilisation? In this fascinating book Rose Macaulay, the well known novelist (and traveller in her own right), sets out to explain that strange 'pleasure of ruins' which has drawn and driven travellers through the ages. Through her own eyes and through the commentary of great observers of the past, from Petrarch to Henry James, she takes the reader on a gigantic excursion across continents and down the centuries through the marvellous relics of dead cities and palaces, in Europe, in the gorgeous (but now jungle swamped) East, in sand- engulfed North Africa, in Mexico and the Peruvian forests. With them she speculates on life before the cities fell and recreates with sensitivity and wit the people who built and destroyed these glorious civilisations, and what their ruins have meant to others.
Her definitive work covers the archaeological and architectural aspects of the sites as well as their literary associations and the book is fully illustrated with both photographs and sketches by travellers of the past.