From Florence, we hop- with very little trouble I might add, (the transit system in Italy is extremely easy to use and we had actually purchased our train tickets a couple of weeks ahead of time via the internet. Would highly recommend that as the tickets arrived by FedEx very quickly) on the train to Rome. The countryside flys by and within a couple of hours we are in the heart of the Roman Empire, or at least what used to be.
This proves to be the first and only time that we get “taken” by someone. The cab we get into drops us at our destination and charges us a “Sabbatical” surcharge for driving on a Sunday. Moving on past that incident we find ourselves at our home for the next 8 days, a condo we rented right next to the Pantheon, and about a block from Santa Maria Sopra Minerva (we will come back to that one a little later) - the wall of the Pantheon was our bedroom window view. As quickly as we were able to get up the stairs and throw our luggage in, we were back out again, eager to start walking these historical streets.
Rome is a very strange place to be- really the cradle of modern civilization, if thousands of years of history can be called modern. To enter the Pantheon, you walk up one stair- two thousand years ago, there was a large staircase leading up to it, but todays city is built upon layers of civilization. They would simply build over top of old structures, thereby raising the height of the city itself over time. It was strange to walk around and wonder what they would find if they simply started to dig under any given street. The Pantheon dates back over two thousand years, originally constructed between AD 119 and 128 by Emperor Hadrian over the site of General Marcus Agrippa’s 27BC temple. Hadrian elected to keep the original inscription attributing the site to Agrippa. The columns (all told 18 of them) as you walk into this temple are staggeringly large and the portico a large enough shelter used for many things, among them at one time a poultry market. In AD 609 it became the church of Santa Maria ad Martyres, where the bones of Christian martyrs from the catacombs were buried.
The architectural feat of this temple is amazing, having stood for so long, and being built of non-reinforced concrete, it is one of the inspirations for Michelangelo’s dome at St. Peter’s Basilica. the Pantheon itself it is equal height and width, the dome rising to 142 feet. (Two identical domes would make a perfect sphere which would fit inside a cube of the same dimensions.) It was the largest dome in the world until the 14th century, until the Duomo in Florence was built. The Oculus, a nine meter wide round opening at the top of the dome, the symbolic link between the temple on earth and the gods in heaven, is the only source of light, and the inside of the building itself has been open to the elements since it’s beginning, with rain water being drained away through small holes in the marble floor.
Throughout the temple there are empty niches. These originally held the marble stautes of the various Roman gods and goddesses which were, needless to say, removed by the Catholic church, and have since been replaced by Christian tombs and altars. The most popular tomb is that of Raphael over which the Madonna del Sasso stands, created by Raphael’s student, Lorenzetto.
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