Graveyard Field Trips: A Memoir

The Glories of Ancient Rome

The Rough Guide to Italy called the Pantheon, "The most complete ancient Roman structure in the city." That alone would have drawn me to see it, but the building stood along our meandering path from the Capuchin catacombs at the Church of the Immaculate Conception to the Mausoleum of Augustus, roughly near our hotel on the Piazza del Popolo. This was our first day in Rome; it wouldn't have been an Adventure with Loren and Mason if we didn't walk our legs off immediately after we'd spent a whole day on planes traveling to Europe.

Emperor Marcus Agrippa, Augustus' son-in-law, built the Pantheon in 27 BCE, the year after Augustus found himself entombed in his nearby mausoleum. That original Pantheon burned down, to be replaced by Hadrian in 125 CE. In 564 CE, the Byzantines stole its gilded bronze roof tiles to adorn Constantinople. The tiles traveled to Alexandria, before being lost to history. The abandoned building in Rome was re-consecrated by Pope Boniface as St. Mary of the Martyrs in 609 CE.

Plummeting from the splendor of Imperial Rome, the Pantheon reached its nadir during the Middle Ages when its portico slummed as a fish market.

In the twenty-first century, the Pantheon still didn't appear prepossessing from the outside. Its stone walls looked rotted and soft as butter. An embankment embedded with miscellaneous pieces of half-excavated architecture surrounded the building. Although no longer a fish market, the church's shadowy portico felt uninviting. However, the columns supporting its roof impressed me. Each red granite drum seemed ten feet high, stacked one upon the next. How had the Romans worked that stone by hand?

As Mason and I entered the church, a multilingual sign cautioned against pickpockets. Everyone -- from friends to strangers, even our dentist -- had warned about the thieves we'd encounter in Italy. I recalled similar advisories about the subway in Prague and the entry of Notre Dame in Paris. Mason and I had never been robbed -- touch wood -- but we weren't the sort of tourists who wore gold jewelry and flashed a lot of bills. All the same, this was the first trip abroad on which I'd brought my beloved Pentax. Although it wasn't an expensive camera, I remained conscious of its bulk inside my backpack.

I wanted to see the Pantheon. I decided to take my chances.

Inside, the church glowed with natural light. The guidebooks spoke of its oculus -- the eye of Heaven -- an opening in the summit of the dome that allowed sunlight in. Astonished by the marvelous concept, I remembered the ominous gloom inside the much-newer Notre-Dame de Paris and London's Westminster Cathedral.

At the edge of the Pantheon's sanctuary, I turned slowly around, counting seven chapels on either side of the main altar, interspersed by eight niches. Christian statues stood in them, but they left no impression on me. Mostly, I tried to envision how the Pantheon used to look. Originally it honored the cult of the twelve gods, a holdover from Greece. Jove stood in the center of the room, surrounded by his family. Niches held statues of Augustus and Hadrian. Becoming emperor elevated them to divinity.

Polished marble of seemingly every shade from peach to maroon faced the walls. Inset panels of yellow-and-cream stone looked like frozen flames and smoke trails. The antico giallo -- yellow marble -- had already become rare in Hadrian's time. To use it here demonstrated how much he treasured this place.

At the front of the sanctuary stood two enormous golden candelabras, now electrified. They must have held two dozen light bulbs each. I wondered if they provided enough light for night services.

On the ceiling above the dark wooden lectors' chairs floated a delicate mosaic, a Christian addition too pretty to dispute. Cerulean tile that really did mimic the color of the sky surrounded gold and cream crosses and stars and wreaths like constellations in the daytime.