The eighth chapter pursues the urge among artists to imaginatively reconstruct the original structures that became ruins, and not just of individual buildings but of the whole ancient city. Reconstructions are to be seen in two-dimensional ‘flat’ art (paintings, drawings, watercolours, engravings, panoramas) and in three-dimensional architectural models. These occasionally inspired the erection of modern buildings which realised the reconstructed image. Modern reconstructions employ digital and computer-generated imagery. In the twentieth century three-dimensional models of ancient Rome were constructed, and imaginative visions of Rome were devised for cinema and television.

Petrarch initiated ruin-tourism, and that flowered in the period of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. Arguably, the ruins of Rome were the first to generate the production of a considerable variety of souvenirs, portable objects manufactured expressly for visitors to take away. Now a souvenir is only desirable if the object it represents is deemed attractive: the ruin-aesthetic was so well established by the time of the Grand Tour that ruins moved from the background of paintings into the foreground; they became the subject. In the engravings of Piranesi the ruins of Rome reached their peak of aesthetic appeal. The aesthetic validation of ruins is to the fore, since the English decorated the interiors of their houses with scenes of ruination. They also brought home architectural models of ruins in cork or marble for display; their porcelain and fans were decorated with ruin motifs.