In her book "Follies and Grottoes," the scholar Barbara Jones writes: "It is built for pleasure, and pleasure is personal, difficult to define.* Folly seems a bad name, for folly is deliberate, and to be foolish one must know what is sensible; the men who built follies put them up quite seriously.* Follies come from money and security and peace".
Once you get used to the fact that De La Pava is less interested in the music of words than the mazes they can build, the pleasures of the book come easily.
In place of some 20 houses, three gardens and the city brickworks, Wallenstein built his pleasure dome.
The palace itself was built for pleasure; burnished with orange trees and hundreds of candles and firework displays.
Indeed, one of the most fruitful periods of cultural exchange between China and the West was during the late Baroque, when western architects built a pleasure palace for China's emperors and chinoiserie was all the rage in Europe.
Beller, an architect who has thrown festivals in brownfields and installed toilets in shantytowns, seeks to "work for a just city, built with pleasure, where each person makes his place".
Angelo is a generous host and a dazzling smile is never far from his lips; indeed, he loves nothing better than to sit around a table with friends and laugh at life, which is fitting in a place built for pleasure.
As, indeed, it is: nearby lies Lake Nemi, a volcanic crater where there was once an important shrine to Diana, and where the Emperor Caligula built gigantic pleasure boats; it's a place that JMW Turner painted and which inspired James Frazer's monumental study of myth, The Golden Bough.
It is often pleasure itself we must strive against before we can ever become who we really are, and in a culture where not only whole lifestyles, but identity is built around pleasure, this can be exceedingly difficult.
Some part of me suspects that it's simply the nature of the scribe to strive to build still loftier pleasure domes.
