Rome’s Pantheon: A Grand Survivor in a Timeless City – New York Times
Not even the best photograph captures the mysterious interplay of light and darkness. To begin with, the Pantheon is a perfect space; the diameter of the rotunda is the same as its height: 142 feet. It is one of the only Roman structures to survive intact since antiquity. Perhaps the invading Barbarians were so overwhelmed by the monument that they didn’t take it apart brick by brick, as they did so many others. Although the Pantheon was consecrated as a church in 609, Christianity has only a tenuous hold on it. This cavernous space, the umbilicus of history, speaks of something so much older and deeper.