The Stones of Venice: Volume II. The Sea-Stories Book

In the second volume in this famous trilogy, John Ruskin offers an extremely in-depth, if also extremely subjective, assessment of Venetian architecture during the high points of Venetian economic and imperial expansion. Emphasizing strongly the apex of Venetian artistic creativity as realized through a cosmopolitan approach to beauty, this volume neatly, perhaps too neatly, attempts to place Venetian culture as a heterogeneous amalgamation. With a critical approach typical of the Victorian Period, one will receive an excessive amount of postulating, hyperbole, and florid prose, but the result is still an extremely important and gorgeously written example of exceptional writing on architecture.