“I love to hear the names of those / Who long ago have past away” (MS VIII; Poems [1891]; Works [1903])—British guidebooks highlighted Lake Como as a harbinger of classical Italy, owing to the association of the “Larian Lake”—the ancient name for Lake Como—with the “residence of the two Plinys, and the scene of the scientific researches of the elder Pliny, the naturalist” (Murray, Hand‐book for Travellers in Switzerland, 225; and see this connection made also in the poem, “Como”, by Samuel Rogers, in Italy). The Villa Pliniana was built on the lakeshore in the sixteenth century around the supposed spring mentioned by the elder Pliny in the Naturalis Historia, and described at length by the younger Pliny in a letter to Licinius Sura (Epistulae, bk. 4, letter 30): “There is a spring which rises in the mountain, and running among the rocks is received into a little banqueting‐room, from whence, after being detained a short time, it falls into the Larian lake”. Pliny relishes reclining by the fountain, drinking the cool water and watching the spring “rise and fall by fixed and measured gradations”. He goes on to speculate about the cause of the intermittent flow (Pliny the Younger, Letters, 1:353, 355). Visitors to the villa could read this letter inscribed on “two large tablets of black marble”, one in Latin and the other in an Italian translation (Mazzoni, The Travellerʼs Guide of Milan, 108).

Plinyʼs letter demonstrates engagement in the idealized pursuits of country villa life (see Ackerman, The Villa, 37). In Ruskinʼs poem, not only is the point of Plinyʼs refinement missed in the clichés drawn from the vocabulary of the picturesque about the dead underfoot; the poem also perversely fails to look overhead at surroundings that impressed Ruskinʼs cousin, just as it moved other English visitors, such as Percy Shelley. In 1818, Shelley wrote to Thomas Love Peacock about trying to procure the Villa Pliniana for an extended stay on the lake. As published by Mary Shelley in 1840, the letter describes “a magnificent palace, . . . now half in ruins, . . . built upon terraces raised from the bottom of the lake, together with its garden at the foot of a semicircular precipice, overshadowed by profound forests of chestnut. The scene from the colonnade is the most extraordinary, at once, and the most lovely that eye ever beheld. On one side is the mountain, and immediately over you are clusters of cyprus‐trees of an astonishing height, which seem to pierce the sky. Above you, from among the clouds, as it were, descends a waterfall of immense size, broken by the woody rocks into a thousand channels to the lake. On the other side is seen the blue extent of the lake and the mountains, speckled with sails and spires. The apartments of the Pliniana are immensely large, but ill furnished and antique. The terraces, which overlook the lake, and conduct under the shade of such immense laurel‐trees as deserve the epithet of Pythian, are most delightful” (Letters, Essays from Abroad, 2:117; and see Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 44–45).

Four years after this poem, in The Poetry of Architecture, Ruskin clung to the characterization of Italy as “glorious in its death”. Here the picturesque view does rise from the “principal character of Italian landscape” of melancholy to that of “elevation”; and a word picture traces “small fountains” such as those falling into the “Larian Lake” to a broader vista of “peak, precipice, and promontory”. Appreciation of such scenes is necessary to the object of these essays, which is the “formation of taste”, although later in the series Ruskin recurs to Pliniana as an impractical model for the modern English villa, when built in hill country: “The first thing . . . which the architect has to do in hill country is to bring his employer down from heroics to common sense; to teach him that, although it might be very well for a man like Pliny, whose whole spirit and life was wrapt up in that of Nature, to set himself down under the splash of a cascade 400 feet high, such escapades are not becoming in English gentlemen; and that it is necessary, for his own satisfaction, as well as that of others, that he should keep in the most quiet and least pretending corners of the landscape which he has chosen”. (The editors of the Library Edition corrected these remarks, noting that the Pliniana “is not . . . on the site of that built by Pliny; it is called after him from an intermittent spring which is asserted to be the one minutely described by him” in the Epistulae [Ruskin, Works, 1:18, 20, 29, 161].)

For other villas visited by the Ruskins, as they rowed south from Cadenabbia, following the eastern shore of the lake toward the city of Como, see the List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”—Illustrations