Giovanni Battista Piranesi (Mogliani di Mestre, Venice, 1720 – Rome, 1778) was a Venetian architect and engraver whose great passion was Rome, but he was also a theorist of architecture and of architectural history, an erudite who could be crazy, dissenting, and legendarily vehement, an author of architectural dreams, a polemicist who invented languages that were considered shocking, sometimes because they were inappropriate and against the current, countering tradition and the tastes of the period, and at other times because they were novel and imaginary, as if coming from one who invented the world out of the powerful shadow of past authority.

He was always polemicizing or conjuring up images, framings, and projects that lay halfway between the rational and irrational, as in a permanent transition between the given and the still-to-come, between the future glimpsed and the passion for the exceptions of memory, that which wished not to remain a mere copy, but to be a testimony of an unexhaustible varying, as shown by antiques and ruins – the ‘talking ruins’ he wrote about long before the appearance of the French revolutionary architects – but also by previous lessons bequeathed by Ligorio, Montano, Borromini, and Juvarra, among other architects he loved...