…in 1860 the lights and shadows were still mediaeval, and mediaeval Rome was alive; the shadows breathed and glowed, full of soft forms felt by lost senses.  No sand-blast of science had yet skinned off the epidermis of history, thought, and feeling.  The pictures were uncleaned, the churches unrestored, the ruins unexcavated.  Mediaeval Rome was sorcery.  Rome was the worst spot on earth to teach nineteenth-century youth what to do with a twentieth-century world.  One’s emotions in Rome were one’s private affair, like one’s glass of absinthe before dinner in the Palais Royal; they must be hurtful, else they could not have been so intense; and they were surely immoral, for no one, priest or politician, could honestly read in the ruins of Rome any other certain lesson than that they were evidence of the just judgments of an outraged God against all the doings of man … Two great experiments of Western civilization had left there the chief monuments of their failure, and nothing proved that the city might not still survive to express the failure of a third … Rome dwarfs teachers.  The greatest men of the age scarcely bore the test of posing with Rome for a background.¹

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Note:

¹ Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Oxford World’s Classics, 2008), pgs. 79-81.