VEF Blog

After the free visit of the Vatican Museums in the morning you can spend the afternoon day tour in Rome visiting the ancient Rome starting from the Pantheon.
The original Pantheon was a rectangular temple built by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, as part of a district renewal plan in 27-25 BC. What tourists see as they relax in front in the Piazza della Rotonda is radically different than that original temple. Hadrian rebuilt the structure in the second century AD; maker's stamps in the bricks allow us to date his restoration between 118 and 125 AD. Still, the inscription on the architrave attributes the construction to Agrippa during his third councilship.The Pantheon is a church of Rome today and contains the tombs of Rafael and of several Italian Kings who unified Italy in the nineteen century.

The Pantheon is made perfectly harmonious by the fact that the distance from the floor to the top of the dome is exactly equal to its diameter. Adytons (shrines recessed into the wall) and coffers (sunken panels) cleverly reduce the weight of the dome, as did a lightweight cement made of pumice used in the upper levels. The dome gets thinner as it approaches the oculus, the hole in the top of the dome used as a light source for the interior. The thickness of the dome at that point is only 1.2 meters.

The oculus is 7.8 meters in diameter. It rains and snow occasionally fall through it, but the floor is slanted and drains cleverly remove the water if it manages to hit the floor. In practice, rain seldom falls inside the dome.

The massive columns supporting the portico weigh 60 tons. Each was 39 feet (11.8 m) tall, five feet (1.5 m) in diameter and made from stone quarried in Egypt. The columns were transported by wooden sledges to the Nile, barged to Alexandria, and put on vessels for a trip across the Mediterranean to the port of Ostia. From there the columns came up the Tiber by barge.

After the visit to the ancient Rome your full day Rome cruise tour will end at the port of Civitavecchia or to the airports of Rome.