The sun, breaking through the clouds that had long hidden it, shone everywhere but here. While Florence was building her Cathedral and her Campanile, and Orvieto her matchless Duomo—while Pisa was showing her piety and her wealth in her Cathedral, her Camposanto, her Baptistery, and her Tower—while Siena was beginning a church greater and more magnificent in design than her shifting fortune would permit her to complete—Rome was building neither cathedral nor campanile, but was selling the marbles of her ancient temples and tombs to the builders of other cities, or quarrying them for her own mean uses.”
“On the slope of the Quirinal Hill, in the quiet enclosure of the convent of St.