The Grand Canal (Canale Grande) winds in an S shape through Venice and is the city's main thoroughfare. It is continuously lined with buildings which date from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries. Many of these, including the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, the Casa d'Oro, and the Casa Dario, were studied by Ruskin. On his first visit to Venice in 1841 Ruskin found drawing on the Grand Canal difficult because of 'the dazzling light of the water', although he found 'a single passage of the grand canal or the Piazzetta worth all of Rome or Naples together' ( Evans and Whitehouse, The Diaries of John Ruskin, Vol I, 184-85). On his visit of 1845, when the foundations for The Stones of Venice were laid, Ruskin's observations were less picturesque. Now he saw the palaces on the Grand Canal 'mouldering down', the Ca' Foscari being 'all but a total ruin...' ( Shapiro, Ruskin in Italy: Letters to his parents 1845 198-99). His drawings made on the Grand Canal include those of the Casa d'Oro and the Casa Contarini Fasan. The latter drawing was made in 1841, Ruskin claiming in the late 1870s that the sketch 'shows the main detail of a little piece in this group of houses in some completeness; but it would take a month to draw even this small group rightly; and it is totally beyond any man's power... to express adequately the mere "contents" of architectural beauty in any general view on the Grand Canal' ( Works, 13.500).