The destinations described in this chapter which were constantly revisited by Ruskin represent his three chief interests: Swiss mountain scenery and the agrarian community of the Alps of Western Switzerland and Savoy; early Venetian Renaissance painting, leading him to the study of Gothic and Byzantine architecture; and Northern French Gothic architecture. The aim is to unpack what he saw in them, as his interpretative gaze penetrated through aesthetic mediations to their cultural, social and moral significance. The layered meanings of all three locations were generated by his changing autobiographical encounter with their historical and cultural pre-existences over more than four decades. Overall, they constitute a paradigm of Ruskin’s travelling from a Romantic paradise, through personal and historical trauma, to his many-faceted version of Restoration.

These places are separated because they are principal sites he revisited repeatedly and they came to represent his most elaborated interpretations. The historical model of Swiss pastoral nationalism at first merged with the original promise of the Romantic British north up to the early 1840s; Venice presented the first major contradiction to his relatively naïve reading of the ModernPainters’ Picturesque in its revelation of early Renaissance painting, prompting a deeper social analysis and eventual religious crisis, the effects of which dominated Ruskin’s writings from the mid-40s to the end; and Northern France was the territory whose earlier aesthetic pleasures he came to recuperate in the 1880s for his resistance to the assaults of modernism, reaffirming a discourse of religious traditionalism. But this narrative of conflicted development actually took place within each location, as Ruskin travelled to them all recurrently throughout his life. The Alps, Venice and Northern France, therefore, chieflyrepresent in turn one thematic emphasis in distinct sections below, but each also fits into the whole story of a life of travel.