The Pantheon

Easter Sunday 2015. Rome. Day one of my Italian vacation. Or perhaps more accurately day half, since we arrived at Rome's airport just before 2:30 p.m. From there our day really became a half day as it took another couple of hours before we made it downtown via the awesomely named Leonardo Express train to our monastery hotel where the dude at the reception desk kept calling me "lord." Made me feel like I was on Game of Thrones for a while there without the risk of dying which comes with being a character on the show.

My expectations for the first (partial) day of any European vacation are pretty low. Think about it. The day before, I've dragged my stuff out about 20 miles to Dulles Airport; sat around for a couple of hours at the gate or (if I'm lucky) in the United lounge drinking Coors Light (unlucky but the only free beer); boarded a plane anywhere between about 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.; ate whatever the airline is serving for dinner; and then spent the rest of the flight sitting mostly upright in coach while trying to get anywhere between three and five hours of not good sleep. The result when I land is a struggle to stay awake until 9 p.m. or so before crashing hard and waking up at a reasonable time the next morning mostly non-jet lagged.

Understandably then, the first day in any city on the other side of the Atlantic is spent getting the general lay of the land, seeing a few minor sights, grabbing a bit to eat and then getting to sleep. Nothing overly complicated that requires a lot of figuring out. The plan for Rome was no exception. I mapped out a route that would get me a general view of the city and a few somewhat important sites (with a stop for some gelato) before making our way back to Piazza Barberini and our hotel.

But something unexpected happened on my first day in Italy. On our way from Piazza Navona to Trajan's Column, we wandered through Piazza della Rotonda and saw the Pantheon for the first time. Now I've seen a lot of great architecture in my time which has brought out emotional responses anywhere from giddiness (Glasgow School of Art, 1997) to reverence (Auguste Perret's Apartments on the Rue Franklin, 1994) but it's been a while since I just stopped in my tracks and stared at a building and had the view just fill me with awe. I got it last month in Rome when I entered Piazza della Rotonda and looked south.

One of the reasons I was most excited to get to Rome was to see the ancient Roman buildings and ruins. I should mention that the Romans were not particularly sensitive architects but that wasn't the point for me. They took a kit of parts perfected by the Greeks, adopted it wholesale without fully understanding it and started using it with a sort of reckless abandon, taking a refined sophisticated vocabulary and making it accessible to everyone, even if the results were not quite as elegant as the original versions. I guess you could say they were their generation's Samsung to the Greeks' Apple. It's not an iPhone, but the screen is way bigger; who cares if it doesn't fit in your pocket?

But their influence on the history of architecture, and the Renaissance in particular, is undeniable. It's easy to not understand just how important the Renaissance was without having ever visited Italy. It was a time when for hundreds of years the whole continent of Europe decided to just abandon learning, science and progress and just wing it. And then all of a sudden in modern day Italy people decided that they needed more than they'd been putting up with for the last few centuries and decided to make a conscious effort to change. I'm sure it wasn't that simple but honestly that's about the substance of it. And visiting Italy really drives the point home.

For most folks in Europe in the years preceding the middle of the fifteenth century, there was little to turn to for inspiration or to teach them how to be better than the middle ages. But in Italy, at least in the field of architecture, there were the Romans. Sure Rome had been mostly destroyed about a millennium beforehand by invading hordes of people anxious to obliterate all memory of the entire civilization but if the Romans got one thing right about architecture it's that they built well. These things have lasted so well that proportion and use of language can be gleaned from what's left. And they built a ton. The remains of Rome are everywhere.

And maybe that's the problem for the 21st century tourist. Or maybe just me. There was so much to see that I was not generally awed by what I found in Rome. The Baths of Caracalla are impressive in their size and what's still standing and you can get a good idea of how impressive they were in their day but ultimately, you end up looking at unfaced brick walls. The Forum is huge and difficult to really understand in a quick visit because the remains of some buildings are so fractional and what's there, even for a single building, seems to represent what was over several different eras. Other sites, like Trajan's Market and the Circus Maximus, almost made we wonder if everything really was worth saving. Maybe the archaeological value outweighs the architectural value.

Even the Colosseum, which is largely intact and occupied a hugely important role in the history of sport in urban settings, was underwhelming. While the north façade is just amazing and it clearly must have been a sight to behold on event day (the events we are talking about here are generally people killing each other or animals or vice versa), the ruins of the place only took a little while to explore and I didn't get a really good impression of how spectacular it must have been. Maybe I'm jaded by spending too much time in modern stadiums. While I was more impressed with the Colosseum than some of the other sites in Rome, I left feeling a little let down.

The Pantheon was different. And by different, I mean better. When I first walked into the Piazza della Rotonda on Easter Sunday, the building wasn't open. There's not a whole lot that is open on Easter Sunday in Rome. So I knew I'd have to go back to explore it later in the week.

The Pantheon dates from the second century A.D. and the time of the emperor Hadrian, who ruled Rome between the years of 117 to 138. Today, there's some debate about the building's architect and purpose. For a while, the building was thought to have been commissioned and erected by Marcus Agrippa, a friend and advisor to the emperor Augustus; the pediment of the building does, after all, bear his name. But it is now thought that Agrippa's name is on the front of the current Pantheon because parts of the building were salvaged from another older building and the Romans just couldn't care less about that part. Remember what I wrote about them being not so sensitive builders earlier in this post.

The building was erected as a temple to all gods, meaning all Roman gods, not the outlawed God that Christians started worshipping around the B.C./A.D. transition. Because of its function as a house of worship, first for the Romans but later when it was converted to a Christian church, the Pantheon is remarkably well preserved. The difference in the condition of the Pantheon vs. all other Roman buildings we saw in Rome was astonishing and that's probably part of the reason why it, and not any other building in Rome, is the subject of this post.

Viewed from the north edge of the Piazza della Rotonda, the Pantheon is striking. It's presence dominates the Piazza even though the square slopes from north to south and the building sits at the low end. The Pantheon appears at first sight as a large brick cylinder with a domed roof fronted by a pediment supported by eight Corinthian columns tacked onto the front of the drum. It's well proportioned and it fills the south end of the plaza well.

But as impressive as the building is from the outside, that's not what stopped me in my tracks on Easter Sunday the first day I was in Rome. This place is a spatial and engineering marvel. Cut a section through the building and draw a circle over that section with the top of the circle fitting into the arc of the dome and you'll find the Pantheon is designed to exactly fit a circle 43.3 meters in diameter. Cut a section the other way and you'll find the same thing, meaning the building is designed to hold an imaginary sphere. There aren't too many other buildings out there that can do this and the effect is pretty stunning.

43.3 meters is equivalent to about 142 feet. That's a big span for a building today but in the second century A.D. that was enormous considering the material typically used to frame roofs and floors in buildings was wood. No way are you going to get wood to span 142 feet unsupported without a composite, really really deep member. To build the roof of the Pantheon, the architect or architects or whoever the decision maker was turned to concrete, a technology invented by the Romans and only really resurrected by man a couple of hundred years ago, which gives you an indication of how sophisticated the Romans were.

The resultant dome is a coffered concrete span ranging in depth from 21 feet to 4 feet. When it was built it was the largest dome in the world. 1,300 years later, it was still the largest dome in the world. Only when the dome of Santa Maria della Fiore was completed in 1436 in Florence did the Pantheon cede the largest dome in the world title. That's pretty impressive. It is still today the sixth largest dome in Europe and the largest ever erected using unreinforced concrete, a record not likely to ever be broken since nobody builds with unreinforced concrete any more.

How many people can fit into the Pantheon?

So after gazing in awe at the building the first day I was in town and doing the same thing a couple of days later when the place was open, it was time to go inside. The building today is still a Christian church but honestly that's not why I visited or why most people stream into the place daily. It's difficult even to remember that it's a church, although the entire throng of people were shushed officially the day we were there for making too much noise.

A lot is the answer.

The reason most people visit this place is because of the Romans. Even if you don't care about the engineering feat that this building represents, you should go anyway. It is the best preserved Roman building in the city. Visiting the ruins of Rome it is easy to envision the whole place as a monochrome city, letting the natural materials used to construct the buildings speak for themselves. The Pantheon presents things as they truly were, from the painted walls to the spectacular multicolored marble floors. You don't get the true picture of how colorful the building is from the outside because it's definitely been pillaged over the centuries. The interior is different. Just ignore the Christian stuff in there and you'll be back in ancient Rome.

I'd love to be in the Pantheon when it was empty or close to empty. Rome is packed with tourists and the Pantheon was no exception. I'd love to be able to take it all in unencumbered by people taking selfies of themselves and their friends. But wait long enough and you'll get glimpses of what you want to see and the coffered dome with the oculus at its peak open to the heavens is as awesome as I imagined it. There's a little artificial light in the place but most of the illumination comes from what looks like the tiny opening at the top of the dome (it's actually about 30 feet in diameter). And it's quite bright, or at least it was on the sunny day we were there. This fact only added to the brilliance of the place.

I knew I admired the Pantheon before I visited Rome. I never really cared for Greek or Roman architecture or what the Italian Renaissance architects made out of the language they borrowed from those two civilizations. To me, the Pantheon always stood out as a building with more meaning than just a brick and stone place with a columniated front which was what most Greek, Roman and Renaissance buildings represented to me. The Pantheon was man's attempt to get the most of the available building materials using engineering to push the envelope and build ever greater. It did not disappoint in person. In fact, it was better than I imagined. As disappointed as I was in all the other Roman buildings and ruins we saw in Italy, the Pantheon made up for them all.

The fantastic multicolored marble floor of the Pantheon; the holes are to drain the water that gets into the place when it rains.