—1950s ecktachrome faded slide of the Pantheon, Rome, Italy
In 2000, I took a solo seven month sabattical with my three young children to Rome. The train left Marino, our home in the Castelli Romani, seven times a day: 7:21 Roma, 8:37 Roma, 11:25 Roma, 1:48 Roma, 7:10 Roma and the 9:13 Roma. We hopped one of the two earliest trains every Saturday morning. They saw it all with enthusiastic eyes and protested the foced march with tired feet. If anything, they were troopers and true sports. At the Pantheon there was no place for the kids to sit, but bless the Romans, what could be better at our next destination then a toppled Roman Forum for the tired pilgrim, pellegrino...
Roman traffic whirled and honked and churned out diesel exhaust with vengence into the mouths of my children but oh, how the Italians love their bambini. Anything, absoultely anythung, for the children. And this is true today and always.
The Pantheon is a memory maker. Pantheon = Greek, "honor all Gods." It is the best preserved of all Roman monuments, built legend says , on the very spot where Romulus, the mythological founder of Rome, ascended to heaven.
Emperor Augustus built the first Pantheon in 27 BC which burned in 80 AD, struck by lightning, only to be burned again in 110 AD. Rebuilt by Hadrian around 120 AD, he hired a Greek architect. Apollodorous of Damascus was fabulously famous and though Hadrian professed a love of architecture, he had him executed over an argument about the temple design—the first terribly bad client. Painters Raphael and Annibale Carracci are buried here alongside the composer Arcangelo Corelli and the architect Baldassare Peruzzi. It is an object of beauty that has infleunced Western architecture for 2000 years. When I stood beneath the dome, gazed skyward through the oculus, heaven and earth met the hand of man.
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