Florence Train Station3

 To the left, the ornate steeple of Santa Maria Novella; to the right, the train station--a succinct lesson in two types of architecture; the older an architecture of divinity and ascension; the latter, a humanistic repudiation of all such ascension, with its flat roof and lateral pattern. An architecture, instead, of the low, planetary breadth of human society.

 Which doesn't make the latter less mystical. The Mesopotamians believed both in sky gods and earth gods (the latter largely forgotten by Christianity). The fable of the tower of Babel may in fact be understood as a warning against single-minded ascension up, up and away from the level spirits of earth. The first sky-scraper came to grief.