Our First Foray - Pentecost at the Pantheon

I am writing this Monday morning. After a long flight and walking all over Rome yesterday we were so exhausted that I couldn’t keep from nodding off as I sat at the computer last night (this was about 8 PM Rome time). So we crawled into bed very early… and I found myself awake very early this morning (5 AM Rome time - wow is my internal clock whacked out!) Beth is still sleeping, but try as I might, I couldn’t fall back asleep. So instead I’m writing this blog entry listening to the birds of the early morning singing outside our hotel window (and Beth snoring quietly beside me).

After settling in briefly at the hotel, we got directions to the Pantheon and headed off. The weather is nice, not too hot, but pretty humid - last week it was apparently 35 degrees, that would have been too much, the current 23 degrees seems just right. The first thing I notice is that the streets are not marked very well, and head off in every direction (nothing like the grid systems of roads we are used to back home). Every block or two I examine the map closely and try to determine if we‘re heading in the right direction. After 15 blocks of this wandering and wondering if we’re heading in the right direction I spot it, the domed roof of the Pantheon!

The first thing I am amazed at is its size, it is larger than I expected. There are crowds of people moving in and out of the building, we look for an admission price but there didn’t seem to be one, so we just walked in. If you have been following this blog for a while you will have read about the reason I wanted to see the Pantheon this specific day - on Pentecost, at the end of Mass, rose petals are dropped through the roof opening onto the congregation below (the Pantheon has been used as a Christian church since the 6th century). By the time we got there Mass had been over for a couple of hours, but as we were looking up at the amazing domed roof both Beth and I saw a single rose petal float down from above. It was almost like one waited for our arrival!

On the ground were many rose petals, evidence of the earlier event, and I gathered one up to take home as an unusual souvenir. It is amazing to think that something like this structure was built with no modern machinery or engineering capabilities - we were standing inside a huge domed building that has existed for almost nineteen hundred years. We took some time to look around at the art and architecture, took a bunch of pictures and then made our way back to the hotel, preparing for our next foray into Rome.