Adamo me fecit

     In The Pound Era, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971, p. 323, Hugh Kenner writes:

It is inconspicuous in the semidarkness, on the left as you descend to the crypt; a double shaft with a common capital, shaped from one block, and inscribed as though in proud afterthought with ornate freehand letters,

Capital of Column, San Zeno Maggiore, Verona

ADAMINUS
DESCO
GEORG
IO. ME
FECI
T

and [Edgar] Williams, who was in Italy on an architectural fellowship, asked how the hell we could have any architecture when we ordered our columns by the gross. It was a Luminous Detail, with the capacity to admonish the present. Mind focused here once, it says, a person knew this stone and the stone proclaims the person. (Pride in the work: Ruskin stirs, who had lived until Pound was 14 and had taught Europe to measure the craft by the craftsman's involvement.)