A Discovery....

Last week I was walking down a stretch of Bologna that I have walked down many, many times before. However, I always walk under the porticos, which severely limit your ability to see anything that is outside of the porticos, especially anything that is above your line-of-site. On this day, I was walking outside of the porticos and saw this on the side of Bologna's main cathedral, the Basilica di San Petronio:

I immediately stopped at this oddity and asked what is that? [In case it is not obvious from this photo ,"that" refers to the half-of-a-stained-glass-window protruding from the side of the church and which seems to have had the other half cut off] What "that" is was Rome's attempt to put a cap on the size of the basilica. At the time San Petronio was built, in the late 1300's, the original design would have led to this church being larger than St. Peter's in Rome. Apparently, the Vatican did not like this idea and forced Bologna to scale-down its project. As a result, the building of the church was prematurely stopped. Here is this part of the church from the other side:

The morals of this story? Don't spend your whole walking beneath the porticos and don't have aspirations that exceed the grandeur of the Vatican....