Word: basilicas
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...through mountain wind and pelting rain as a special act of devotion to the Virgin Mary on the 100th anniversary of her apparition to little Bernadette Soubirous in the grotto at Lourdes. By 10 o'clock, some 50,000 people were massed within the encircling wings of the basilica, or jammed shoulder to shoulder on the surrounding hillsides...
Rome Domesticated. Palladia was a master at building churches, convents and palaces. At 31 he walked off with a competition to reface the great medieval Basilica at Vicenza. His improvised solution-a two-story arcade made up of Doric and Ionic columns that frame intervening arches supported by free-standing columns-was so brilliantly successful that it has since been copied the length and breadth of Europe. A decade later he was the architect Venice turned to for the plans of San Giorgio Maggiore, one of the most beautiful, classically ordered churches in the city. But it was the country...
Under Turkish rule, Constantinople's famed Christian shrines, like the great basilica of Saint Sophia, were restored and refurbished to the glory of Allah. Slim minarets rose skyward alongside rounded Byzantine domes. New architectural jewels, like the Blue Mosque of Sultan Ahmed I, sprang up to rival the old, and the hiving humanity drawn by commerce to this natural crossroads of land and sea began to fill every available crevice with the insignificant architecture of its daily life...
...overtaken by dawn had to remain parked until sunset. He also tried to straighten out confusion in the Forum by moving the Rostra (named for the rostra, ships' prows, captured at Actium), where orators held forth, to one end of the Forum. He began the 110-yd.-long Basilica Julia, alongside the Temple of Castor and Pollux (see cut), to serve as an exchange, law court and meeting place. Caesar's successors carried on with ever-increasing grandiloquence and display, creating whole new Forums in one imperial gesture. Boasted Augustus, Caesar's grandnephew: "I found a Rome...
...people than any Pope in history, registered three firsts: for the first time in his reign he granted a delegation of Jews (from the American Jewish Committee) a formal pontifical address. For the first time since the Russian revolution a group of Russian tourists visited St. Peter's Basilica while the Pope was carried through the aisles in his shoulder-borne chair (they disappeared before the apostolic benediction). And for the first time women's fashions received smiles rather than censure from the Vatican. In receiving some 200 designers, models, salesgirls and seamstresses of Rome...