The Colosseum.

The Colosseum is a monument that woos by extravagance. There is little beauty to me left in its worm eaten form. Its secrets have all been revealed, its stage gone to show the bizarre inner workings of its interior. Magnificence it has through its size, but also a lurking ugliness and even a terror when one remembers its history. And I think less of the terror of the tortures that it inflicted on criminals and slaves, and more of the terror that can be called forth in any feeling human by imagining so many locked in pleasurable enchantment at the torture of others.

A description was given of the Colosseum as it stood in the middle ages when it was a dark place full of shadows, bandits, wolves, and other monsters of the medieval mind. This seems a more fitting end to the structure than the gladiators with cell phones that now inhabit the periphery, the gaudy tourists, the angry postcard salesman. The terror has become mixed with the chaos, snake-lines of tourists winding their way through the brick lined passageways.