Pantheon Small-Group Tour in 60 Minutes, Including the Archaeoastronomy

Sixty minutes with a professional guide inside the temple the Romans dedicated to all the gods, and an hour is enough to cover it properly. The interior has come down almost untouched. The guide works through the dome, the tombs, and the legends that have attached themselves to the place, separating the ones with evidence behind them from the ones without. The unusual part of this tour is the archaeoastronomy. The oculus is not only a light source but a calendar: the beam it drops moves round the interior through the year in a way the builders understood, and on 21 April, the traditional founding date of Rome, it falls on the entrance at midday. Anyone planning to see that should know that with summer time in force it happens closer to one o'clock than to twelve. The engineering gets its own section, since this is the only building of its size and age to have come through the centuries intact. And on the way there is Bernini's elephant, whose history is stranger than it looks.