[Labyrinthos]

Tossing aside religion and politics — from an engineering and architectural viewpoint, the building is beautiful.

[Jack Black]

Yes, it's amazing. 537 A.D. - St. Peter's was completed in 1626. It's the missing piece in our history (Western people) We tend to know about Rome, the dark ages, and then the Renaissance. But Rome didn't fall in 475 in the East, it continued and prospered for another 1,000 years.

A relatively new explanation for much of the seeming "advances" of the Renaissance is that when the Ottoman's overan the Byzantine Empire in 1453 many merchants and craftsman fled to Venice, and thence to other parts of Italy. Venice was a center of commerce that their were already trade routes with.

The Renaisance then was, in some measure, a homecoming of the knowledge of the ancient Italians (the Romans) that had been transferred East by Constantine the Great, only to return over 1,000 years later. Famously the first dome built in Europe since antiquity was built in Florence in 1436. So the timing was good, Europe was back in the monumental construction business.