The Stones of Venice

The Stones of Venice is beautifully written and a must-read for anyone interested in art, architecture, Venice, and Victorian literature. The massive original has been pared down here into a much more manageable volume without sacrificing its brilliant prose and insightful commentary. It'll easily fit in your carry-on luggage for your next trip to Italy.

Hey, guys! A lot of the reviews of this book are complaining that the text is abridged. No! This book is the first of THREE VOLUMES which, together, make up the entire "Stones of Venice." To get the whole thing, you need to buy Volumes 10 and 11 as well, not just Volume 9. (N.B., "The Nature of Gothic," the best-known part, is in Volume 10.) It's all there. You just weren't looking in the right place. That having been said, it's a shame that one has to spend about $300 to get the complete text in a nice, hardbound format. But it's still a worthy investment.

This is an abridged version of the original 3 volumes, but a delightful book -- both for the opinions expressed and the wonderful pomposity with which they are presented. It's impossible not to learn about art and architecture from this book, but it also (perhaps not intentionally) makes Woody Allen's or Steve Martin's New Yorker pieces seem like downers. The man has no humility and there is no opinion other than his, yet somehow the clarity and vitality of his description allows you to continue reading. I was fortunate enough to pick this up in Venice, so I was able to search out his examples of the 5 worst buildings in Venice, and similar Ruskinisms.

I haven't read this yet, but I thought I would warn other buyers that this is not the full text of the Stones of Venice--it is abridged. J. G. Links seems confident that he has done so in an intelligent way; perhaps he will win me over...