"There is nothing like the enigma of the Arcade—invented by the Romans, with all that could be Roman. A street, an arch: the sun looks different when it bathes a Roman wall in light. . . . In Rome the sense of prophecy is somehow larger: a feeling of infinite and distant grandeur inhabits it, the same feeling with which the Roman builder imbues his arcades, a reflection of the spasm of the infinite which the heavenly arch sometimes produces in man.
—Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros (and other writings)