Nearly two thousand years after it was built, the dome behind that temple front is still the largest of unreinforced concrete anywhere in the world, while the block around it looks shapeless from the street, and that is exactly why you want to go inside. Behind bronze doors that are nearly eighteen centuries old, the centre of that dome opens in a nine-metre hole that has never had a cover. So the rain comes in, caught by drainage holes that have been in the floor since the second century. On a clear day a round patch of light slides across the walls, as if someone inside were pointing at the passing of time. These days you need a ticket, and that is the price of the only ancient building in Rome that still has its roof on.
The inscription on the front names , the general and friend of the first emperor , as the builder. He did put something up here, and after it burned down the emperor raised this version almost a century and a half later, keeping the old name on the front.
The reason it still stands is that in the year 609 it became a church, and churches were rarely torn down. In the seventeenth century, though, had the bronze stripped from the porch to make cannons. His family name was , and the Romans turned it into a line: what the barbarians left standing, the Barberini carried off.
To the left of the centre lies the tomb of , the Renaissance painter.
From here we carry on along the left side of the Pantheon, down Via Giustiniani, keeping left until a narrow passage brings us out onto a long, stretched-out square.
Sources. Story: Sovrintendenza Capitolina / Basilica di Santa Maria ad Martyres; Treccani (Pantheon) Photos: Photo 1: Rabax63 (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0) | Photo 2: Poepoe (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
