@JamesLucasIT Very pleased you included the Anthony Hopkins clip from Westworld. That was how I initially learned about this theory. Also, Westworld is criminally underrated but that's another post entirely.
A single family was so obsessed with its own glory that it built a tomb covered, floor to ceiling, in marble and precious stones. The work took so long that the family went completely extinct before it was finished...
This is the Chapel of the Princes in Florence, the mausoleum of the Medici, the dynasty that ruled the city and bankrolled the Renaissance.
It sits behind the Basilica of San Lorenzo, beneath the second-largest dome in Florence, surpassed only by Brunelleschi's. And inside, there is not a single bare surface: every wall, every column, every inch is sheathed in dark, gleaming stone.
The Medici wanted a tomb that would rival the great royal mausoleums of Europe and announce that they were not merely bankers, but rulers chosen, almost, by God.
So they did not decorate the chapel with paint. They covered it in pietre dure: precious and semi-precious stones, porphyry, jasper, lapis lazuli, coral, mother-of-pearl, cut and fitted together by hand like a vast jigsaw of jewels. The work was so difficult and so costly that the family founded an entire workshop just to produce it, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, which still exists in Florence today.
The scale of the ambition is almost hard to believe. Construction began in 1604. Along the lower walls, craftsmen inlaid the coats of arms of sixteen Tuscan cities in glowing stone. Six grand dukes were entombed in niches of porphyry and granite. And still the work went on, decade after decade, generation after generation.
It went on so long that the Medici dynasty died out...
The last of the line, Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, used part of her fortune to push the chapel toward completion, but she did not live to see it done. The floor of inlaid stone was not finished until 1962, more than three and a half centuries after the first stone was laid, and more than two hundred years after the family it was built to glorify had vanished from the earth.
The Medici built it to make themselves immortal, and it worked. The family is gone but you can still stand inside the room they built to be remembered by, surrounded on every side by their refusal to be forgotten...
@ChrisTwiggsPM@ClownWorld 100% this ☝️. Unless they are changed frequently, gloves are a harbor for bacteria and germs. The guy’s bracelet needs to go but if the hands are washed properly it’s fine. Replying as former pizza cook.
@ClownWorld Honestly it’s commonplace in every pizza place I’ve worked at that you need to wash your hands but gloves weren’t mandatory. They make it harder to work with the dough.
@lilcoqui84@Venmo@VenmoSupport It’s locked because you want to use it. Venmo does it constantly when I purchase Litecoin, have to re-upload ID and wait days.
@WallStreetApes The only reason they're still in business is because despite the bitching about prices, NPCs are still paying the inflated price. Haven't eaten there in over a decade.
@VenmoSupport Why can’t you post or make available every limit / security feature so we can stop the damn guessing games? Holding my crypto without reason is unacceptable.
@VenmoSupport@venmo for the second time in a month you will not let me send my crypto to ANY address. Please figure this out ASAP, you are unlawfully holding my currency.