The book I have is called “Insignium Romae templorum” written by “Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi”. I took various steps to narrow down the search for compareable book with the help of Alice.
First I typed in the name of my book, but it didn’t lead to anything. My book has it focus on architectural buildings and designs. Since it contains mostly drawings and not a lot of words. Therefore it was quite hard to start searching for keywords.
The next words I searched for were : Rome, Rossi, Temple…and these words in connection with architectual/17th century/
I ended up getting a lot of answers having to do with different philosophers like Leibniz and Spinoza. Mostly because they had connections to Rome. I continued by adding the word temple. There I found a book written by John Ruskin with the title: “The Stones of Venice”. Ruskin and Rossi essentially do the same thing. Ruskin analyses buildings and their purpose. But in contrast to Rossi is Ruskins book has a lot of text and written parts. There are some small illustrations that show details Ruskin found on these Venice buildings. But they do not exist to give you an overview over the building, more to explain the text in a graphic way. i landed on a book by Jacob Burckhardt. The title of the book is “The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance”. The book is described by the author as a so called coffee-table-book. So basically, it’s a perfect mix between the first one from Ruskin, that was a “reading-book” and Rossi’s “looking-book”.
My conclusion is that “Alice” can be overwhelming at first, because it’s such a wide span of information. I think it can be a very useful tool, which I will definitely use in the future.