Between the establishment of the Kingdom of Greece in 1832 and the expansion of tourist travel in the eastern Mediterranean during the 1880s, illustrated books were one of the foremost means for people in Britain to see and conceive the landscapes of Greece and Anatolia. Working to nuance the idea that British audiences regarded these locations exclusively through the lens of idealised antiquity, this project examines different strategies for mediating place in books illustrated with lithographs and wood and steel engravings, and the sketches and watercolours created to produce them. On the one hand, this means asking what was distinctive about different Greek and Anatolian landscapes for British travellers, paying attention to agroecology, physical geography, archaeology, the built environment, and the lives of the people of Greece and the Ottoman Empire. On the other, it merits considering how images of landscapes were created by artists and draughtsmen and disseminated and viewed in the thriving market for illustrated books that flourished in Victorian Britain. Underpinned by the conviction that any attempt to apprehend the Mediterranean past is mediated by perceptions of the present, I argue that Victorian illustrated books have had a longstanding impact on ways of looking at ‘ancient landscapes’ beyond the nineteenth century.