Grand Hotel des Etrangers

The prospect of ruin seems to permeate the very fabric of the buildings of Italy, the notion of ancientness somehow embedded in the country's architecture. None more so than in the Pompeii region. This exacting line drawing of the Hotel Piccola Sentinella Hotel on Isola d'Ischia in the Bay of Naples in 1851 embodies this pathos: the hotel was entirely brought to the ground in the devasting earthquake of 1883, during which 4,000 people were thought to have died on the island.