Prayers in Stone

The book begins with a visit to Carnac, in Brittany, where an ancient culture erected three thousand huge stones in mysterious alignments. "Perhaps nothing that follows," Liberman writes, "has moved me more than the inexplicable majesty of these testaments to human yearning." Liberman ends with Matisse's Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, in southern France. Other sites in the book include the great temple complex at Paestum, south of Naples; the Parthenon in Athens; the Pantheon in Rome; the monastery of Hosios Loukas, near Delphi; and the cathedral of Santa Maria dell'Assunta on Torcello, in the Venetian lagoon, with its Byzantine mosaics.