We were in Rome for work on Friday and stayed to poke around the city on Saturday morning before our train. What a fabulous place, and so very different from Milan. Whereas in Milan you notice the tourists, in Rome it is the locals who are the strangers and thus stand out.
The city itself is a chaotic mix of ancient and alive, things that are so old you cannot move them and things moving in every direction at once. There are scooters in every conceivable space and people pointing cameras in every direction.
Except in the Pantheon. In the Pantheon you point the cameras up. You look up. In fact, everyone looks up and every camera is pointed in that direction. Because it is the perfect hole in the top of the dome, with it's ray of perfect light shining through, that is both amazing and unbelievable. And the reason we all walked through the grandiose entrance and the columns around it.
The Pantheon is quite old. It was entirely rebuilt in 125AD by Emperor Hadrian. RE-built. It originally was constructed between 27 - 25BC as a temple. That's BC as in Before Christ.
In 609 AD it was consecrated as a Christian site because apparently the Christians had a hard time passing the structure without a trail of demons tormenting them along the way.
Flash forward a thousand years+ and the building is one of the finest and most complete examples of Roman architecture in the city. The diameter is exactly equal to the height and the hole in the center of the dome is a full 9 meters across. There are no supports to be seen, all hidden within the walls themselves.
It is marvelous. The ray of light breaching the hole in the center of the dome, and striking the interior wall, is one of the most dignified and majestic combinations of nature and structure that I can imagine. And I, for one, couldn't help pointing my camera in that direction as well.
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