How I Loved the Broken Things of Rome

Foro Imperiali
Trajin's Column
“Panting, he leaned against the railing of the Trajan Forum, which was still all torn up from recent excavations. Unsympathetic to these labours which devastated a near past for the profit of a more distant one, he leaned over and looked down into a space a few yards and a few centuries below ours, like one who, peering into an old grave reopened in the cemetery,
fears to fall into it.”

                 Maguerite Yourcenar,
                 A Coin in Nine Hands (1934)