Pantheon Guided Tour Starting from Piazza Navona and the Flood Marks

The tour starts a few streets away, in the Piazza Navona area, and the reason becomes clear as you walk. The square has the shape it does because a stadium built by Domitian lies underneath it, and the outline of the racing track is still the outline of the piazza. The guide covers that, and the buildings around it, before the Pantheon comes into view. On the way there are two things most visitors walk past without seeing: the original Roman street level, several metres below the one you are standing on, and the flood marks cut into the walls, recording how high the Tiber came in the years when it came a long way. Marble friezes too, at the height where they were meant to be read. There is a Michelangelo on the route, a Christ, and the guide stops for it. Then the Pantheon itself, entered without the ticket queue: the eye in the dome, and the tomb of Raphael below it. The building has been in continuous use for nineteen centuries, which is why it still has a roof. The flood marks have a church attached to them. Santa Maria sopra Minerva, a minute behind the Pantheon, carries a column of marble plaques on its front recording where the Tiber reached in the years it came over the banks, the highest of them from the flood of Christmas 1598. Reading them from the bottom upwards is the quickest lesson in why the river was finally walled in during the nineteenth century. The Michelangelo is inside that same church, a standing Christ carrying the cross, completed by an assistant after a black vein turned up in the face of the first block. The Minerva also holds Fra Angelico's tomb and the body of Catherine of Siena beneath the high altar, and Bernini's small elephant carrying an obelisk stands in the square outside the door. Street level is the other thing the route is built to show. The portico floor sits lower than the piazza you cross to reach it, so you step down into a building that was designed to be climbed up to. Rome has risen around it by metres, not centimetres, and once someone points that out the same effect is visible on half the streets nearby. Domitian built his stadium for Greek athletics in the 80s AD, for something like thirty thousand spectators, and the square's name comes from those games: in agone wore down into Navona. A section of the arcading survives under the north end and can be visited on a ticket of its own. This walk goes over the top of it. Two conditions before you pay. The booking cannot be cancelled and no refund is issued, and the group leaves from a numbered doorway on Piazza Navona at a set time, so arriving late costs the whole ticket rather than the first few minutes. The square is large: find the number the evening before. Ninety minutes, the greater part of it in the open air, so dress for the street rather than for the interior. Raphael asked to be buried in the Pantheon and was, at thirty-seven. The line above the tomb is Cardinal Bembo's, and it says that nature feared to be outdone by him while he lived and feared to die with him when he died.