22 December 2000 – Rome
Spent the best part of the day sitting in and ambling through the Pantheon; one wonders what it must have been like before the later Romans came with their god and their saints, tearing out the older deities and the bronze rosettes for the baldacchino at St. Peter’s.
The Pantheon is on such a scale, one can imagine it the product of some heroic age. Yet even so, it is not monstrous; is does not, cannot, make one feel small. People wander through, heads thrown back, staring open-mouthed at the immense ceiling…
It is strange to think of an ancient temple as a modern church – the faiths are so different, not in magnitude, but in kind.