For it is indeed a breach of morality, according to the Romantics, to destroy a thing of beauty. The real memories of Italy s divine places were cheapened by a negligence of their remains. By progressively slandering the immortality of past memories, society was sinking the ideals Romanticism wanted to salvage. Using ruined landscapes as subjects for poetry rather than backdrops for poetry, Romanticism strove to preserve the memories of fallen empires so we may draw from them. Yet always shading the historical memories are the memories of fiction that focus more on the mind of history than the actions of history.
Landscapes represent actual memories.
A better term may be the memory of one s imagination. To the Romantics the imagination was assuredly real, and anything created by that imagination often became a glorious memory. The difference between memories of fiction and memories of history is that fiction forms a picture of characters with definite motives. To explore characters motives rather than just their actions is a closer look at the imaginations behind those actions. To form memories about imaginative characters was to have ideas with which one could compare one s own imagination.