“It’s a strange and insufferable uncertainty to know that monumental beauty always supposes servitude,” Albert Camus wrote in the last volume of his Notebooks (1951–1959), speaking of the forced labor that creates great buildings like this. (He was in Rome when this idea came to him.) “Perhaps it’s for this that I put the beauty of a landscape above all else—it’s not paid for by any injustice and my heart is free there.”
