The term "Gothic" was created by Italian Renaissance writers who recognized the art and architecture of the mid twelfth to
fifteenth centuries to the northern tribes of Goths. They thought the Gothic school of architecture, with its flying buttresses,
rib vaulting, pointed arches and the presence of gargoyles on the inside
as well as outside the building, created a sublimely dark effect on the mind, one of the unexplained, the ugly, and the grave.
By the end of the eighteenth century the meaning of the word "Gothic"
changed from "medieval" to "macabre”. The son of the famous politician Sir Robert Walpole, named Horace, was a well-known
writer and amateur who slowly transformed his simple villa into the most renowned Gothic building of the age. It was there,
in a place with pillars, vaults, arches and a fairy tale tower, that Horace was
visited by a dream that would initiate a new literary genre.
"I waked one morning in the beginning of last June from a dream,
which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle and that on the uppermost banister of a great
staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what
I intended to say or relate." Inspired, Walpole sat down and wrote The
Castle of Otranto, the world's first Gothic novel and one of the most powerful novels in the history of English