Safeguarding Venice: Giacomo Boni and John Ruskin

The essay concerns the relationship between John Ruskin and the young Giacomo Boni. Trained as an architect in Venice during his youth, Boni became mostly famous as an archaeologist thanks to the following exploration of the Roman Forum. The paper contributes to define the inspiration Boni took from his Maestro John Ruskin about the restoration of Venetian Palazzi through the analysis of Ruskin’s surviving letters, just partially published in their Italian translation only. In 1882, he defended the Ruskinian concept of restoration as a hard interference with the flow of time in a pamphlet he personally wrote with other young artists and intellectuals, l’Avvenire dei monumenti (“The Future of Monuments”), which is entirely transcribed in the Appendix.