First, the rock creases up into long slabs of concertinaed cliff before opening out into a huge granite-grey gorge, which takes any sound and echoes it into a feedback loop: shouts fade and return seconds later in irregular jumps.

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From there we can see dozens of rectangular slabs set into the pavement, marking the burial places of centuries of Florentine families, and along the walls, funerary monuments to some of the greatest names in Italian history, including Dante, Michelangelo, Machiavelli, Galileo and Rossini, which make Santa Croce the Italian equivalent of Paris's Pantheon or London's Westminster Abbey, a shrine to the so-called lay saints of a modern nation-state.

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Photographs he showed from Sandy's destruction looked very much like those after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005: houses washed from their slabs or collapsed into their foundations, and critical equipment such as generators or switches flooded on ground floors or in basements.

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But large cranes outfitted with lights operated into the night to lift massive slabs of masonry, said NPR's Melissa Block, who was at the scene.

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The casket was lowered into a grave and covered with stone slabs, as wailing crowds jostled around the burial site.

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The concrete slabs that rise storey by storey into the heavens are also gray on gray.

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He guided us into a narrow cove almost hidden among the giant slabs.

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In the shinkansen case, large slabs of concrete peeled off tunnel walls and slammed into the passenger compartments of passing bullet-trains.

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