Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome is so spacious inside that the Statue of Liberty, pedestal and all, could stand upright and not scrape the top of the dome. This “architectural jewel of the Roman Catholic Church” took more than 80 years to build. Afterwards, cracks began to appear.

A century and a half later the situation was dire and, although many people who should have known better chose to ignore or downplay the possibility, the dome was on the verge of collapse. Had that happened, it would have been one of the greatest catastrophic failures in architectural history.