“Author’s Introduction,” “The Relationship Between Buildings, Monuments, and Public Squares,” and “The Enclosed Character of the Public Square”: from The Art of Building Cities (1889)

Memory of travel is the stuff of our fairest dreams. Splendid cities, plazas, monuments, and landscapes thus pass before our eyes, and we enjoy again the charming and impressive spectacles that we have formerly experienced. If we could but stop again at those places where beauty never satiates, we could bear many dreary hours with a light heart and pursue life’s long struggle with new energies. Assuredly the imperturbable lightheartedness of the South, on the Hellenic coast, in lower Italy and other favored climes, is above all a gift of nature. And the old cities of these countries, built after the beauty of nature itself, continue to augment nature’s gentle and irresistible influence upon the soul of man. Only the person who has never understood the beauty of an ancient city could contradict this assertion.