Pantheon Tour with an Archaeologist, Ten People Maximum

Ten people maximum, and an archaeologist rather than a guide with a script. That combination is the whole proposition: at ten you can ask a question and get an answer, which stops being possible somewhere around twenty. The walk begins at the elephant in Piazza della Minerva, a small marble animal carrying an Egyptian obelisk on its back, in front of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Rome's only Gothic church is right there and costs nothing to enter. From the square the group goes through to the Pantheon on a booked entry slot. Inside, the subject is how the building was designed and why it has lasted: an ancient temple that became a church and never stopped being used, with the largest dome the ancient world produced still overhead. The route between the two takes in the smaller things on the way, the streets and corners that appear on no list of sights but explain how this quarter came to look the way it does.