Mediterranean Architecture Quotes

There is beauty to the run-down buildings, the laundry strung high overhead, the rhythm and drawl of daily life here. There is beauty, too, in the old Mediterranean architecture, buildings left over from centuries ago, before Naples became what it is today. There is beauty in the discrepancy -- two things that seems oppositional, coming together.

Orange County, featured none but Mediterranean architecture; indeed, the Mediterranean style prevailed to such an extent that it sometimes seemed restfully consistent but at other times was boring, suffocating, as if the chief executive officer of Taco Bell had somehow become an all-powerful dictator and had decreed that everyone must live not in houses but in Mexican restaurants.

According to Architectural Digest, big mansions surrounded by vast estate gardens and thoroughbred horse farms are really good places to live. According to Town & Country, strands of fat pearls are lustrous. According to Travel & Leisure, a private yacht anchored in the sunny Mediterranean is relaxing.

Greeks and Romans were anti-Mediterranean cultures, in the sense of being at odds with much of the political heritages of Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. While Hellenism was influenced—and enriched—at times by Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Persian art, literature, religion, and architecture, its faith in consensual government and free markets was unique. Greek and Latin words for “democracy,” “republic,” “city-state,” “constitution,” “freedom,” “liberty,” and “free speech” have no philological equivalents in other ancient languages of the Mediterranean (and few in the contemporary languages of the non-West as well).

Just as the Mediterranean separated France from the country Algiers, so did the Mississippi separate New Orleans proper from Algiers Point. The neighborhood had a strange mix. It looked seedier and more laid-back all at the same time. Many artists lived on the peninsula, with greenery everywhere and the most beautiful and exotic plants. The French influence was heavy in Algiers, as if the air above the water had carried as much ambience as it could across to the little neighborhood. There were more dilapidated buildings in the community, but Jackson and Buddy passed homes with completely manicured properties, too, and wild ferns growing out of baskets on the porches, as if they were a part of the architecture. Many of the buildings had rich, ornamental detail, wood trim hand-carved by craftsmen and artisans years ago. The community almost had the look of an ailing beach town on some forgotten coast.

When Constantine converted to Christianity, there basically was no Christian architecture. Local Christian communities met in converted houses, and especially in the face of periodic imperial persecution, the religion had developed no specific architectural forms of its own. In the fourth century, therefore, as imperial patronage and ongoing processes of conversion caused large numbers of specialist churches to be built for the first time, the religion took over an old form of public building from the Graeco-Roman world: the basilica. This was a rectangular, shallow-vaulted building, usually equipped with aisles around an elevated central nave and an apse at one end. It had long been used for town council buildings and audience chambers across the Mediterranean world, with the apse being occupied by the presiding figure of power (or indeed the emperor in the case of a palace audience chamber). For Christianity, the apse worked nicely for the sacred space of the altar, and the basilica was a building form essentially designed for meetings, which worked, too, as a space for church services

But the Scottish patron on tour took home with him from Italy much more than his cargo of paintings, sculptures and antique marbles, the tangible souvenirs of his excursion to the south. He took home as well a sophistication of taste and an appreciation of the virtues of classicism which only contact with the Mediterranean inheritance could impart. Only sixty years before the building of the pedimented façade of Duff House in Banff, with its urns and roof-line statuary more in keeping with a southern sky, the typical laird's house in Scotland was still inspired by an economy of display and a strength of fabric deriving from less settled times. The 18th century saw the transportation to Scotland of the idea of the Italian palace, and Hopetoun or Floors or Chatelherault owe their existence to this inspiration.

Another celebrated building that we saw inside the Fort was the Diwan-i-Khas. Here can be seen in Persian characters the famous inscription, “If a paradise be on the face of the earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.” At the time of the Delhi Durbar in 1903 to celebrate the proclamation of Edward VII as Emperor of India, this exquisite building was used as a supper room. “This is the Chandni Chauk [Silver Street],” said our driver as we passed along Delhi’s main street. “It is the richest street in the world.” “Used to be,” corrected Sam. “It was sacked at least four times and most of its riches carried away.” Nowadays it is the abode of the jewelers and ivory workers of Delhi. Ten miles south of Delhi, amid the ruins of another ancient Delhi, stands the Kutb Minar, which is said to be the most perfect tower in the world and one of the seven architectural wonders of India. Built of marble and sandstone which is dark red at the base, pink in the middle, and orange on the top story, this remarkable structure, 238 feet high, looks almost brand new, yet it was built in A.D. 1200. Close by is another Indian wonder, the Iron Pillar, dating from A.D. 400. A remarkable tribute to Hindu knowledge of metallurgy and engineering, this pillar, some sixteen inches in diameter and twenty-three feet eight inches in height, is made of pure rustless malleable iron and is estimated to weigh more than six tons. Overlooking both the Fort and the city, and approached by a magnificent flight of stone steps, is the Great Mosque, also erected by Emperor Shah Jehan. It has three domes of white marble, two tall minarets, and a front court measuring 450 feet square, paved with granite and inlaid with marble. “Sight-seeing in Delhi is as tiring as doing the Mediterranean,” I

The second map is of Sardinia itself: the main island with its many islets. It is not a floating green mountain with a defining valley that splices along the south by southwest, as a topographical map would show. Instead, this map is as colorful as a neon strip of nightlife you might download on a cell phone for the latest cultural events. In fact, devised as a geoportal and online app by a volunteer organization called Nurnet in 2013, the map pinpoints the thousands of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments across the islands with the fanfare of an open museum. As part of Nurnet’s mission to “promote a different image of Sardinia in the world,” the map is nothing less than astounding. If you actually illuminated all of these ancient monuments, from the Neolithic array of Stonehenge-like dolmens and menhir stone formations to the thousands of burial tombs, Bronze Age towers and complexes called nuraghes or nuraghi, the entire island would light up like a prehistoric hotspot. The vastness of the uninterrupted cycles of civilizations and their architectural marvels still standing today would be incomparable with any place in Europe on that first Mediterranean map. The Sardinians call it the “endless museum.

some historians call Sicily “the world’s island” because it has been conquered by so many peoples, owing to its location in the middle of the Mediterranean, valuable for trade and military reasons. Sicilians have been influenced by each culture, and the island’s amazingly diverse history is reflected in its dramatic architecture, ruggedly beautiful terrain, delicious food, sibilant language, even the faces of its people.

As we wander, I’m struck by something so simple. In the heated couple on the corner, in the women carrying their shopping home, in the children playing and screaming in the streets. Naples is a place of connection. Of community. There is beauty to the run-down buildings, the laundry strung high overhead, the rhythm and drawl of daily life here. There is beauty, too, in the old Mediterranean architecture, buildings left over from centuries ago, before Naples became what it is today. There is beauty in the discrepancy—two things that seem oppositional, coming together. New and old, rich and ruined, history in its entirety, here at once. It’s a place that was once glorious and carries the memory not as a chip, but a promise. Again, someday.

When this story opens at the birth of Christ, the European landscape was marked by extraordinary contrasts. The circle of the Mediterranean, newly united under Roman imperial domination, hosted a politically sophisticated, economically advanced and culturally developed civilization. This world had philosophy, banking, professional armies, literature, stunning architecture and rubbish collection. Otherwise, apart from some bits west of the Rhine and south of the Danube which were already beginning to march to the tune of a more Mediterranean beat, the rest of Europe was home to subsistence-level farmers, organized in small-scale political units. Much of it was dominated by Germanic-speakers, who had some iron tools and weapons, but who worked generally in wood, had little literacy and never built in stone. The further east you went, the simpler it all became: fewer iron tools, less productive agricultures and a lower population density. This was, in fact, the ancient world in western Eurasia: a dominant Mediterranean circle lording it over an undeveloped northern hinterland. Move forward a thousand years, and the world had turned. Not only had Slavic-speakers replaced Germanic-speakers as the dominant force over much of barbarian Europe, and some Germanic-speakers replaced Romans and Celts in some of the rest, but, even more fundamentally, Mediterranean dominance had been broken. Politically, this was caused by the emergence of larger and more solid state formations in the old northern hinterland, as exemplified by the Moravians, but the pattern was not limited to politics. By the year 1000, many of the Mediterranean's cultural patterns - not least Christianity, literacy and building in stone - were also spreading north and east. Essentially, patterns of human organization were moving towards much greater homogeneity right across the European landmass. It was these new state and cultural structures that broke for ever the ancient world order of Mediterranean domination. Barbarian Europe was barbarian no longer. The ancient world order had given way to cultural and political patterns that were more directly ancestral to those of modern Europe.