Excerpt from Glories of the Catholic Church in Art, Architecture and History: Comprising 256 Superb Photographing Views, With Graphic Commentary, Legend and Description, by Eminent Catholic Writers On the tsth of July, 1823, it was destroyed by fire, owing to the carelessness of plumbers who had been at work' rn the building, and almost all the art treasures which it contained were lost beyond recall. Pope Pius Vll was on his death bed at the time, and passed away the following night He was a member of the Benedictine order and had spent many happy years of study and prayer in the monastery of St. Pa'ul 5, so that he loved this edifice above all the other churches of his cathedral city. At the time of its destruction he was dis turbed by painful dreams, which he received as warnings of some great disaster impending upon the Church. He awoke repeatedly with a start, and asked what terrible thing had happened; but, in order to spare his last hours from an unnec essary shock and grief, the fact of the destruction ofthe grand old basilica was hidden from him. A portion of the apse and the glorious triumphal arch in the center of the church alone survived the disaster, as a result of the most prodigious exer trons. His successor, Leo Xll, in spite of the straitened condi tion of the papal finances at the time, restored it from memory, on the same dimensions, and as far as possible according to the old pattern, making it even more splendid than before. 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.