The Pantheon Unexpectedly

People's Plaza

The things that just lie round a corner off the street are amazing. This was in an office lobby.

Even in Rome there is the occasional WTF moment. The Ara Pacis.

An amazing little plaza with grocer, butcher, cafe, bar and baker.

Cheesy laneway shot complete with scooters. But seriously, this is just a standard old lane. People live and work behind these doors. Amazing from my suburban Australian perspective.

Yup.

Re-staging my first glimpse of the Pantheon. That's pretty much how I saw it as I meandered across another square, map in hand.

Amazing. Though it seems I have to work on correcting the distortion on the LX100.

At the threshold.

Oculus 

Okay, there is one issue with the LX100... the lens isn't wide enough and the panos it makes aren't great. Still it would have been better than nothing. I'll remember next time.

And again. That beam of light needs to be seen to be believed.

I made it to the Forum. Seriously, I had planned to get out of Rome for a day trip or two... but I think I am going to run out of time. The Forum alone will take a day.

I was going to make an obvious pun about Brisbane developers here... but I won't.

I am scared of Roman traffic. These peoplereally, really know how to ride scooters.

Originally I had intended to jump on one of those buses and just ride around town today. However, a bit of research showed that many services had been cancelled because of some expected protests, so I decided to take a walk along the Via Flaminia instead.

I made a decision to just carry the LX100 again and leave the bi ol’ DSLR at home. It was a decision I was happy with. That little camera is doing a great job of catching so many shots that matter. It’s easy to carry, is versatile, discrete, damned easy to use in manual mode and has a whole range of creative options built in. I’m hoping to include a couple of videos shortly. They have all been shot on this camera and are completely unedited.

But enough gear talk…

I crossed the bridge and started at the People’s Plaza, then just meandered south. I quickly became tired of the main drag, so ducked into a small lane shortly after passing the Piazza Augusto. This turned out to be the second good decision of the day. Fifty meters along, about half way between the busy Via del Corso and Via de Scrofa, the lane opened up into a little piazza. The whole place was no bigger than a large backyard, but contained a butcher, seafood shop, grocer, bar and coffee shop. Astonishing! I bought a bag of fruit and some fresh bread for about 4 EU (a stock that was to fuel me all day), as well as a really (I mean really!) good doppio. I drank it balanced on a post on the corner of the lane, occasionally having to jostle out of the way of cars edging their way through the place, along with everyone else.

Which brings me to a point.

The Romans are mad. But it is an absolutely sane kind of mad. This place smacks of the chaotic, with rules and regulation seeming to be entirely discretionary. Road signs are more like guidelines. People ride their scooters with their phones jammed under their helmets, dialing with one hand and steering with the other. On the other hand… there were an awful lot of ambulances rushing around, and I did see two accidents. I suppose every Italian scooter or bicycle rider must at least know what a fracture feels like.

Anyway…

I stuck to the laneways and tumbled into so many delightful scenes that I emptied the poor old LX100’s battery rather quickly. It’s the camera’s only fault so far… short legs. Oh, and an insufficiently wide lens. But that was good, as it meant I stopped snapping and looked around more… which is a good thing for I may otherwise have missed the Pantheon.

I couldn’t believe it. The Pantheon is one of two buildings that will make this entire trip worthwhile for me. Just this morning on the dawn shoot I’d stood on a bridge and been amazed that the Pantheon was only ten minutes’ walk away… but I had determined to leave it for another day.

Now, stumbling through a little piazza, I caught a glimpse of the unmistakable dome, just a hundred meters down an alley I was crossing. It really was a glimpse, like seeing someone you’re not sure you want to meet, so avoiding eye contact was reflexive. I kept walking and sat down on the steps of a chapel across the piazza to ponder this sudden encounter.

I wrote a journal entry, sent an email to an old friend, and ate a banana while sitting in the sun and thinking about whether I should go see the Pantheon. Actually, there really wasn’t a decision to be made. I just needed a bit of time to savour the moment.

I could really carry on about this place but I won’t. I spent about two hours there, just sitting on the porch outside, finding a corner within to watch the shadows move as the turned and the oculus’ beam crawled across the masonry within. It was all a bit moving, and the place was everything I had imagined.

One thing did surprise me, though; I didn’t mind the crowd. The place was packed, but it occurred to me that this was exactly as it was meant to be. This is not a church, not a place of quiet, despite the rather ironic loudspeaker announcements in four languages begging people to keep their voices down. This was intended as a meeting place and having a few hundred people milling around, even dumb tourists like me, gave the space the splash of life for the real genius of the design to become apparent.

Because it was not loud. It was not harsh. A hundred jabbering voices blended into a bubbling murmur of considerable volume but negligible audible impact. I had the feeling that a single voice would clang about the chamber, but a multitude seemed exactly what it was built to hold.

So… that was the Pantheon.

After that I decided to ramble up to the Trevi Fountain, which was a grating ten minutes’ walk away up the Corsa. It was closed for renovations, but still at least three hundred people stood there looking at the scaffolding. One honestly has to wonder.

So… my head still lost in the void beneath that dome and not really wanting to dilute the feeling with any other divine interiors, I decided to just go look at the Roman Forum. Now, I have a day set aside to really look at the Forum, but I decided to finish my ramble by gazing upon some ruins. Another mind-bogglingly short walk took me there and on to the Colosseum… a walk dominated by more restoration work and scaffolding.

It was probably a bit much. After a long day filled with long anticipated experiences, I merely gazed up at the Colosseum and thought that if this was Brisbane that thing would be a casino by now and the forum would be a block of flats. But all of that is for another day.