The Pantheon is one of the most impressive buildings in Rome,and one of the great spiritual buildings of the world. It was rebuilt as a Roman temple (118-126 A.D.) by Emperor Hadrian to replace an earlier temple designed by Agrippa in 27 B.C., and later consecrated as a Catholic Church in 609 A.D.

The original rectangular temple, consisting of sixteen single granite columns, became the porch for the newly devised dome structure. Once the Romans learned to use concrete, they were able to mold on the ground their rounded tops for their buildings and hoist them into place on top of a rotunda. The Pantheon is just such a structure with an opening at the center top of the dome.

Its monumental porch originally faced a rectangular colonnaded temple courtyard and now enfronts the smaller Piazza della Rotonda. Through great bronze doors, one enters one great circular room.

The interior volume is a cylinder above which rises the hemispherical dome. Opposite the door is a recessed semicircular apse, and on each side are three additional recesses, alternately rectangular and semicircular, separated from the space under the dome by paired monolithic columns.

The only natural light enters through an unglazed oculus at the center of the dome and through the bronze doors to the portico. As the sun moves, striking patterns of light illuminate the walls and floors of porphyry, granite and yellow marbles. — JY

Pantheon - Rome, Italy - Great Buildings Online  http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Pantheon.html
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Thanks to Prof. Ben Lawton
A MONUMENT'S MINDER
New York Times
By Elin Schoen Brockman
June 27, 2004

IT'S a chilly May evening, I'm alone in Rome and I've come to the Pantheon to comfort myself, to bask in the positività, as they say in Italy. Hundreds of other people mill around the echoing rotunda, stopping to pay respects at the tombs of King Vittorio Emanuele II, King Umberto I, Queen Margherita di Savoia and Raphael, "the prince of painters," but mostly staring up, way up, to marvel at the vastness of the dome and watch the disk of fading daylight visible through its wide-open oculus.

Suddenly a small woman with short, copper-colored hair zips through the crowd and disappears into an alcove next to the main altar. Seconds later the lights go out. A bell rings. The copper-haired woman reappears. "Prego," she says loudly and clearly, urging the crowd toward the great doors. "Prego, si chiude," closing time, everyone out.

I follow her, fascinated. I want to meet her. I've had an epiphany. The Big Questions that the Pantheon always inspires (for instance, how it's managed to survive in its present form for nearly 1,900 years of fires, earthquakes, lightning, floods and barbarians, not to mention Pope Urban VIII's renewal projects) have given way to smaller yet still pressing concerns, beginning with: Who cleans up in here? What does it take to help this precious monument survive all these people (3.5 million visitors a year, it turns out)?

I catch up with the woman, ask if she has worked here long. "Twenty-four years," she says, smiling, "but not this weekend." If I come by Monday morning we can talk. The earlier the better, before the crowds. "Ask for Saveria," she says. By this time we've reached the gigantic bronze doors. One is already closed. The other is closing slowly, two men pushing and shoving as though it weighed eight tons, which, I later find out, it does. I slip out. Saveria waves. The door clangs shut.

First thing Monday morning, Saveria Maruca and I sit inside the glass booth in the Pantheon's already-crowded foyer sipping cappuccino from Di Rienzo across the piazza. Or rather, I sit. She stands, poised to dart out and stop all who make the mistake of entering here with gelato, panini, animals, tripods, bicycles, skateboards or cigarettes, and anyone lying on the floor, standing on a bench, or (this really happened) climbing up a conservator's scaffold to take pictures. Visitor after visitor taps on the glass. Over and over, Saveria answers the eternal questions: No, there's no glass in the oculus; yes, it does rain in; and lots of others, some having nothing to do with the Pantheon. ("Is there a tattoo parlor nearby?")

Saveria is one of five custodi (guardians, preservers, keepers) of the Pantheon. Only Piero Cardone, in charge of personnel and one of her closest friends, has been here longer than she; he's considered the "papa di tutta la piazza." They, along with seven young, linguistically versatile guides and two workmen, are employed by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, a government agency, since the Pantheon, as the burial place of royalty, is a national monument. But it is also very much a Catholic church (the pagan gods were banished in 609 in a ceremony that created All Saints' Day and, therefore, Halloween) with its own parish priest conducting Masses, baptisms, christenings, funerals and weddings (it costs $335 to be married here, a little more if you want flowers) even as the tourists circulate.

When Saveria steps outside for a cigarette, I join her on the portico. She shows me the site of every graffiti emergency in recent history and where La Nonna, a legend among the homeless people who inhabit the portico, used to sit making nosegays that she sold in "all the great restaurants" until she died. She points out the mess of cartons and bags left by patrons of the McDonald's that opened across the piazza from the Pantheon around eight years ago.

As we stroll, she notices me noticing the clutch of keys she rubs as if they're rosary beads. "The keys to the Pantheon!" she says, and places them in my hands, pleased at how impressed I am to be holding them. Clearly her pride in this building has not diminished since 1980 when, at the age of 29, she agreed to become the first woman ever to work here despite the lack of electricity, somewhere to sit near a radiator, and a bathroom of her own (conditions have improved on all counts).

When she opens up in the morning after the subway ride from Acilia, a community between Rome and Ostia where she has lived almost all her life, she unlocks the back entrance "and immediately I feel a sense of well-being," she says. "I'm in this immense, grand monument and I fear nothing, I feel perfectly at home." She turns off the alarm, turns on the lights, steps into the rotunda. She checks for leaks, fallen marble, anything out of place or missing, circling the rotunda, conscious of the echo of her footsteps, sometimes stopping at Raphael's luminous glass tomb to say "Buongiorno, Raffaello."

"It's such a beautiful sensation," she tells me, "to find yourself the only one in here, to feel yourself the proprietor of the portico, of everything that's inside. It's priceless, priceless." Occasionally in the middle of one of those nights when she's the last to leave, Saveria wakes up worried that she forgot to turn off the lights in Raphael's tomb. (She never has.)

She knows every corner of this monument and most of its secrets (though she's well aware no one will ever know all of them), the location of each of the 22 original ancient Roman drains that keep rain from becoming a problem, and where, on days when the patch of sky above the oculus is blue, the huge sun spot that circles the building will alight at any given moment. On midsummer days she and her colleagues can even tell time by it, as their ancestors did. Several times when Piero Cardone has gone inside Raphael's tomb to change the light bulb, she's accompanied him to polish the glass. And she's been up on the roof, where the Tiber gulls roost and nest and you can see all the way to the Castelli Romani. She's even climbed up the huge lead-covered rings of the dome, which is wider than the dome of St. Peter's, all the way to the oculus. Every year during the Pentecost Mass, two or three firemen make this climb with huge sacks of rose petals, which they empty over the edge of the oculus to shower slowly, spectacularly down into the rotunda.

The only aspect of the Pantheon in which Saveria isn't actively involved is its past. She leaves issues such as where the other great artists are buried (Raphael is not the only one spending eternity here) to the guides, who are genial, erudite, and conduct free tours. Whenever I've visited the Pantheon since Saveria first showed me around, one or another of the guides has pointed out something new (to me, at least). Last winter, for instance, Federico de Martino, a young art historian who has worked here for four years, told me that the Pantheon plays a leading role in the Henry James story "The Last of the Valerii" and is lavishly described, right down to the grasses growing up through the cracks in the rotunda floor, nourished by the rain. "That was before they restored the floor, of course," he said.

Something or other is always being restored here, it seems. At the moment, conservators are about to begin a total cleaning of the dome, which will proceed "in slices, like a cake," as the personnel director, Piero Cardone, put it, so the building can remain open. Roman buildings famously tend to be shut for years while in restauro. But the Pantheon is unlike any other building. "It is the one place," Federico said, "that contains the whole story of Rome from the beginning up to now. We are all very lucky to work here."

Visitor Information

The Pantheon, also known as Chiesa di Santa Maria ad Martyres, presides over the Piazza della Rotonda in the Historic Center of Rome. It is open from 8:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Monday to Saturday; from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday, and 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on holidays that fall on weekdays except for Christmas Day, New Year's Day and May 1, when it is closed. There is no admission fee.

Masses are suspended at least until September because of scheduled restoration work. Normally, Mass is celebrated daily at 5 p.m. and there are special Masses on Christmas Eve and on Pentecost (the seventh Sunday after Easter) as well as occasional concerts and other special events. For information, call (39-06) 68300230.

Even when the Pantheon is closed, it's worth a visit. There's nothing quite like sipping a cappuccino at one of the cafe tables that spill into the piazza, almost up to the Giacomo della Porta fountain, and contemplating the facade that launched a thousand American state capitol buildings, not to mention the Jefferson Memorial and Monticello - especially at night, when the Pantheon is bathed by strategically placed spotlights.

As you approach the portico, if you go to the front column farthest to the left, you can see the charming Barberini bee that crowns its capital, the signature of Pope Urban VIII, who restored that particular column.

ELIN SCHOEN BROCKMAN is writing a novel set in Rome.

The New York Times > Travel > A Monument's Minder

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