Though a Pope gave permission for a large part of it to be demolished to construct a huge Palace for his nephew (Palazzo della Cancelleria).

Nepotism vs martyrdom - no competition!

And the Parthenon probably only survived that long because it was protected by being turned into a church in the Christian Roman/Byzantine empire & then a mosque under the Ottomans.

It's not a coincidence it's the biggest surviving structure (despite the explosion) on the Acropolis, the other buildings will have been demolished.

Most of them were. In the center of Rome only a few examples survive. The rest of that city of one million people was torn down to build the medieval city, or the Renaissance city or even the Baroque city. If you know where to look, later Roman buildings are full of scraps pillaged from Ancient Rome (including much of the lime used in the building mortars: made by burning ancient Roman limestone & marble!)

Or sometimes the opposite. I've written a longer comment in this thread mentioning that as Pagan temples fell into disuse in Ancient Rome as the empire rapidly Christianised, the authorities kept promulgating laws every twenty or thirty years against despoiling the old, pagan buildings (apparently they were good tourist attractions!). However, making new laws means that the old laws weren't working. And this was mainly that the older structures were too convenient as quarries of ready dressed material to reuse in new buildings - churches especially, but also houses, palaces, fountains - you name it. Especially as the older Roman infrastructure & huge slave numbers were declining rapidly.

Only the sanctity of a few holy sites saved them - for a time: the Pantheon became a church (but was still stripped of its Roman bronze doors in the 17th century) and the Colosseum (a martyrs' shrine) survived pretty well till the 16th century when the Pope no less gave his nephew permission to demolish a large part of it to build a suitably enormous palace.

In Rome the old buildings served as quarries for later buildings- especially Imperial buildings were demolished in the resources-starved medieval period. From the earliest period of Christianity in the Roman empire, the collapse of support for pagan religions meant the temples were neglected and started being pillaged for their decorative stone especially - the bulk of the coloured marble in Roman churches dates from imperial Rome (in the older churches in Rome, most of their often mismatched columns have been taken from older pagan temples) Ever noticed a lot of churches have large disks of coloured stone set into the floor or walls - sections sawn from pagan Roman columns. Marble was burnt to make lime for mortar. We know this was an on-going problem as the authorities from the 4th century onwards kept writing new laws to stop it from happening, as previous laws were clearly not working. So the ravages of time which brought the buildings of imperial Rome low had two legs & hammers, chisels and wheel barrows.

A few buildings were protected as holy sites - the Colosseum survived reasonably intact for a long time as it was a martyrs' shrine, but in the 15th century special permission was given by a Pope to his nephew to take a lot of stone from it to build the ginormous Palazzo della Cancelleria.

Moving large blocks of stone, especially on land, is really difficult in a pre-modern period. Most of the best marbles in Rome came from Asia Minor by boat in the Roman period. Once there was no longer the infrastructure - or the slaves - to move stone, people just grabbed it from the nearest empty building, the temple of whatever. Lots of the older, medieval buildings in the ghetto in Rome have architraves, bits of columns or statues embedded in them, and are probably built with stone & lime & rubble hacked from older imperial Roman structures.

Even Bernini's Four Rivers fountain in Piazza Novanta "re-uses" (that's the correct technical term) travertine blocks from the Roman Circus that used to occupy the site (you can see an excavated space at the North end of the piazza that has a section of the original Roman structure about 4m below current ground level)

It's a fascinating & complicated subject. Some buildings in the center of Rome incorporate stone from all major periods of history: medieval base with inserted Roman decoration, next floor a Renaissance logia, then Baroque window frames, all topped by an illegal 1970s cement terrace.

His singing is truely ghastly ‐ like frogs being grated on fingernails. I now fast forward through all the songs ‐ a great pity as I love them in the books: they were the first poems I memorised as a teenager.

I started off being enthusiastic about his reading but now, halfway through the Fellowship, I am getting a bit tired of all his regional brit accents, though I like his "normal" voice when he's doing plain narrative,.

Yes! Came here to say this. Just finishing the magnificent Neverwhere now!

Came here to say this. But careful, the pleather will absorb stuff (oils from plasticine or putty, or alcohol itself) & the white coloring may be subject to marking or staining for the same reason.

Probably the safest is let it wear off.

As a curious art conservator however I'd first find what dissolves/removes the ink using Tic tac packets as my guinea pigs, and only then see if the same stuff works on the headphones (do safety tests first on an invisible part of the band)

Standard operating procedure: leave testing on the object itself to the last phase if possible.