Book Description

Excerpt from The Cathedrals and Churches of Rome and Southern Italy At Rome, the seven great churches made by Constantine, which still retain the name of basilica in an especial manner, were probably all law courts originally, and pre served their old arrangements, which served as types for others, and came to be considered the usual arrangement of a church. On the full emancipation of the Christians at the be ginning of the fourth century, under Constantine, they naturally looked around them to see which of the ancient Classic buildings they could adopt or imitate in the new buildings that they required. The temples were utterly unsuited, if not considered unworthy for the purpose; but in the basilica, or halls of justice attached to the palaces, they found what they wanted - structures of a commodious, useful character, and less pretentious than the buildings which had been devoted to Pagan rites. The Christians even retained the name as well as the general form, and imitated many of the details of the halls. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.