Rome, Italy - Pantheon

The Pantheon was an amazing building and breathtaking to see.  We were there on a rainy night, which adds to the mystique of the building. And, yes, the circular hole in the ceiling is open to the weather.  The rain was in a puddle on the floor.

The front is being refurbished, which is better than seeing it in disrepair.  The inside is marble from end to end.

I am glad that Kalen was along to translate all of this.  I was the proud Brophy mom with the student reading this ancient text!  Let's talk about the "front porch".  Consider the work and the logistics in this explanation that I found on wikipedia.  I walked up to the building and said "wow".  Then I read this information when I was writing this blog post, and can't imagine what it took to haul these tall columns from the Egyptian quarry to Rome.

It took 732 construction workers over three years to construct the Pantheon. The Pantheon’s porch was originally designed for monolithic granite columns with shafts 50 Roman feet tall (weighing about 100 tons) and capitals 10 Roman feet tall in the Corinthian style. The taller porch would have hidden the second pediment visible on the intermediate block. Instead, the builders made many awkward adjustments in order to use shafts 40 Roman feet tall and capitals eight Roman feet tall.
This substitution was probably a result of logistical difficulties at some stage in the construction. The grey granite columns that were actually used in the Pantheon's pronaos were quarried in Egypt at Mons Claudianus in the eastern mountains. Each was 39 feet (12 m) tall, five feet (1.5 m) in diameter, and 60 tons in weight.[30] These were dragged more than 100 km from the quarry to the river on wooden sledges. They were floated by barge down the Nile River when the water level was high during the spring floods, and then transferred to vessels to cross the Mediterranean Sea to the Roman port of Ostia. There, they were transferred back onto barges and pulled up the Tiber River to Rome.

We walked inside and I just started taking pictures. I stood in the middle of the room and just swiveled all around!

 And then I looked up....WOW.  What a view.  This oculus, and the doors at the front, are the only sources of natural light.  It is also used for cooling and ventilation. When rain falls, there is a drainage system below the floor that handles the water.

 The dome has sunken panels, called domes, in five rings of 28.  It is thought that, in Antiquity, these contained bronze stars, rosettes, or other decorations.

 The floor was marble.  The square pattern contradicts with the circular pattern of the dome.

The third niche holds the mortal remains – his Ossa et cineres, "Bones and ashes", as the inscription on the sarcophagus says – of the great artist Raphael. His fiancée, Maria Bibbiena is buried to the right of his sarcophagus; she died before they could marry. The sarcophagus was given by Pope Gregory XVI, and its inscription reads ILLE HIC EST RAPHAEL TIMUIT QUO SOSPITE VINCI / RERUM MAGNA PARENS ET MORIENTE MORI, meaning "Here lies Raphael, by whom the mother of all things (Nature) feared to be overcome while he was living, and while he was dying, herself to die". The epigraph was written by Pietro Bembo. (wikipedia)

 The exit was very dramatic with the warm color from inside and the wet rainy surfaces outside.

 One last look at the the interior.  It is difficult to imagine the precision of this space.  If you took a cross-section of this area, you would see that a 43.3 m-diameter sphere fits under its dome.

The exterior of the building is rather plain and unassuming, aside from the front entrance. We came to it at night, across a piazza with a fountain, so my attention was not on the building exterior.  I have no photos of the outside.