The glorious Pantheon

The Pantheon is Rome's only intact ancient Roman temple

"Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime" is the list Byron made when his poet's pen began failing for words to capture the indescribable beauty of the Pantheon, a "temple to all the gods." The only ancient Roman temple to survive the centuries intact is one of the engineering marvels of the ancient world.

It was designed in AD 118–125 by none other than Emperor Hadrian himself, who was quite the brilliant architect, and the genius of how its enormous concrete dome manges to hold up under its own weight remained a mystery until the masters of the Renaissance unlocked its secrets over 1,300 years later.

The tension around the ring of that oculus, combined with ribbed vaulting with the fabric of the dome (and the fact that the thickness of the concrete, as well as the stones mixed into it, get smaller and lighter towards the apex) help hold up its enormous weight.

The Pantheon When it Rains Whenever it starts raining and I'm in central Rome, I start running, not for shelter but for the Pantheon. There you can watch the raindrops floating down from the gaping oculus in the Pantheon's dome, splattering against the worn marble flooring, and slipping through the drain on the floor. On the rare occasions when it snows, the effect is downright mystical.

Slip through the crack between the original and massive 20-ton bronze doors and stand in the center of the floor, surrounded by antique marble panels, quiet frescoes, and the tombs of Italy's short-lived 19th-century monarchical dynasty (3 kings total, only two of which are here) and of the painter Raphael.

A thick shaft of sunlight pierces the air inside the temple, flooding through the 18-foot oculus, a hole at the center of the dome.

The sheer sense of volume and airiness of the space inside has to be seen to be believed, a cubic space capped by a coffered conrete dome which is precisely as high as it is wide: 142 feet. In other words, if you could find a basketball big enough, it would fit perfectly in this space.

Such an engineering marvel remained unduplicated until the Renaissance, and it was only relatively recently that that Hadrian's secrets were revealed. For one thing, the roof's made of poured concrete (a Roman invention) composed of light pumice stone, and the weight of it, rather than bearing down, is distributed by brick arches embedded sideways into the fabric of the walls and channeled into a ring of tension around the lip of that oculus. It also helps that the walls are 25 feet thick.

The Pantheon has survived the ages because it was left alone by the barbarians, who recognized its beauty, and by zealous, temple-destroying Christians, who reconsecrated it as a church in 608 under Boniface IV (mass said at 5pm Sat, 10:30am Sun).

Later Christians weren't as charitable. When the 18th-century Pope Urban VIII, a prince of the Barberini family, removed the bronze tiles from the portico and melted them down to make 80 cannon and the baldacchino in St. Peter's, it prompted one local wit to quip (via Pasquino, the talking statue) "What even the barbarians wouldn't do, Barberini did."

Interestingly enough, as a church it is dedicated to Santa Maria ad Martyres, or Saint Mary of the Martyrs—and since the martyrs are the saints, and the saints (especially here in the Catholic Mediterranean) are the "gods" of Christianity, the Pantheon remains what it was in antiquity: a temple dedicated to "all the gods."

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