Book excerpt: Renaissance Europe, with its humanistic impulse, may have brought the cathedral-building Middle Ages to an end, but it rechanneled the religious fervor of the old era into a new cult, the cult of opera, whose grandiose rites demanded theatres as monumental and as prominently placed as any cathedral ever built. In Opera Houses of the World the musicologist Thierry Beauvert narrates in text and glorious image alike, the story of those fabulous buildings - the princes of the blood or of commerce who commissioned them, the architects who designed and decorated them, the composers who wrote for them, the golden-voiced singers who performed on their stages, and even the audiences who still attend performances like worshippers in sacred temples.