Pantheon, Sant'Ignazio and the Corners the Guidebooks Skip

Twelve people at most, and a route built around the things nobody puts on a list. It starts in Piazza di Pietra, under the columns of the Temple of Hadrian, with a piece of imperial gossip that ends badly. Then Sant'Ignazio, where a painted ceiling turns a flat vault into open sky and the dome you think you are looking at is a canvas. Most people stop at the first illusion, pay their coin for the mirror and leave. There are others in that church, and this tour goes and finds them. Inside the Pantheon the subject is the dome, the largest in solid concrete anywhere, and a light effect that happens on only a few days a year and was worked out relatively recently. Where the beam lands on those days, and the date it does so, is not an accident. After that, Piazza della Minerva and the elephant, which local tradition says was turned to face a particular convent as an artist's insult to a friar. San Luigi dei Francesi for the Caravaggios, free to enter and a few minutes away. Piazza Navona, and a look from street level down into Domitian's stadium. For anyone who has already done the obvious version of Rome.