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  • The American Scholar

    CHAIN GANG

    Mar 04, 2024 4 minutes

    y law, no building in Rome’s city center may exceed the height of St. Peter’s Basilica. Its immense, distinctive dome towers above the city’s Seven Hills, dominating the horizon from as far away as the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, nearly 25 miles to the east. Like the Colosseum, St. Peter’s now seems as eternal as the Eternal City itself, yet when Pope Benedict XIV sent a team of three mathematicians to inspect the dome in 1742, they found, as Benedict suspected they might, a cataclysm waiting to happen: 350 feet above ground level, the colossal structure was riddled with cracks, many clearly visible from the floor of the basilica, others noticeable only within its maze of

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