re: #353 The Sanity Inspector

Ancient Roman aqueduct converted to early Christian church discovered.

The famous Pont du Gard, the Roman aqueduct bridge at Nimes, France, is close to the top of my list of wonders I have actually seen. It is an iconic structure, of course, featured in textbooks at all levels. I had seen pictures of it all my life before I finally got to see it in person. It was not as long as I had thought, a relatively short span over a narrow valley, but it is gigantically, awesomely tall, 160 feet if memory serves. I had no idea it would be that high before I got there; though I could have checked the dimensions easily enough. Standing at the bottom, the three tiers of arches just seem to soar away into the sky. It was astounding to see this and realize that it was built essentially by hand almost 2000 years ago. Another apparently familiar structure that surprised me with its size was the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It is as big as a fairly large office building, basically half a block long and also about 160 feet high, but this isn’t obvious in most pictures.
The ultimate in truly awesome structures for me (and many many others since ancient times) is also the most obvious and popular, the The Great Pyramid of Ghiza, “Khufu’s Horizon.” You can see the pictures and read the descriptions, but they don’t even begin to do it justice. It is not a building so much as an artificial mountain. It always seem much closer than it is until you are right up on it and it blots out the sky.
At the risk of being pilloried for artistic blasphemy and cultural provincialism, the least impressive structure relative to its reputation was probably the Parthenon in Athens. It was no doubt beautiful at one time but today it seems like little more than a pile of bleached rocks.