The Italian register

Agrigento · Valley of Temples
A peristasis of six columns by thirteen, raised about 440 BC. The Bureau records it as the best preserved of its kind and attributes this to the absence of later improvement. The temple stands on a crepidoma of four steps; the shafts are six metres high, cut with twenty flutes and given the slight swelling the Greeks used to correct the eye. The Bureau notes that the correction was applied to a building most viewers would see from below, where it is least needed, and admires the thoroughness.

Florence · Santa Maria del Fiore
Begun in 1296; the dome closed in 1436 and remains the largest masonry dome ever raised. The Bureau holds nothing comparable on its register and has stopped looking. The design is Arnolfo di Cambio's, the dome Brunelleschi's, and a hundred and forty years separate the two. The cathedral complex has formed part of a World Heritage site since 1982. The Bureau notes that the building was finished long before it was listed, and finds the order satisfactory.

Milan · Santa Maria Nascente
Begun in 1386 and declared finished in 1965. The Bureau has reviewed the file and considers five hundred and seventy-nine years a reasonable interval for a cathedral. The roof carries 135 spires, a figure the register prints as counted rather than as estimated. Funds ran short often enough that the spires were at one point offered for adoption. The Bureau holds that a building paid for in instalments over six centuries is not unfinished but merely patient.

Naples · Piazza del Plebiscito
Laid out in 1816 and completed in 1846, beneath a dome of fifty-three metres. The Bureau finds thirty years for a public square unremarkable. The church was begun by one sovereign and finished by another, who kept the colonnade and changed its purpose. The dome is held to answer the Pantheon in Rome, at a distance of some seventeen centuries. The Bureau has compared the two entries in its register and declines to rank them, noting that the later one at least had the earlier to consult.

Palermo · Arab-Norman See
Raised in 1185 on the site of a Byzantine basilica. The Bureau files the building under continuous occupancy and declines to date the foundations. The church was built by a Norman archbishop for a Norman king, in a city that had been Arab within living memory, and it shows all three in the same elevation. Later centuries added what they had. The Bureau has given up separating the layers and now records the building as a single entry, which is how it is seen.

Pisa · Cathedral Square
Stabilisation work between 1993 and 2001 brought the lean back to 3.97 degrees, from five and a half. The Bureau files the tower as level, pending. The foundations were laid on 9 August 1173, on ground that began to give way before the third storey was reached. The tower stands 55.86 metres on the low side and 56.67 on the high, a difference of eighty centimetres between two measurements of the same building. The Bureau records both and has taken no position.

Pompeii · The Forum
Buried under four to six metres of ash in AD 79, and largely preserved by it. The Bureau files the eruption under conservation measures, unintended. The town held ten to twenty thousand inhabitants at the time. Excavation began in 1748 under Roque Joaquin de Alcubierre, who did not at first establish which city he had found. The Bureau notes that the place was better known before it was buried than for the millennium and a half that followed.

Rome · Flavian Amphitheatre
Opened in AD 80 and seated for fifty thousand. The Bureau lists the amphitheatre as standing, in part, and files the outstanding repairs under long-term maintenance. Building began in 72 under one emperor and finished in 80 under his son. Estimates of the capacity run from fifty to eighty thousand depending on the century; the register prints the lower figure, on the principle that a seating plan should not be optimistic. The Bureau has found no comparable structure still in use for public assembly.