Wonder.

Agrippa, Pantheon, 25 BC

The Paris Review scales the roof of the Pantheon ...

Most people see the Pantheon and think, What a neat-looking old thing.

Others look at it and can only wonder how and when they’ll get to the top. 

“Although it may come as no surprise that the Pantheon’s roof is off-limits in our highly litigious times,” Matt Donovan writes, “groups of scholars and artists from the American Academy in Rome climbed the dome on a regular basis as recently as the 1970s.  One visitor described the short walk as a straining and vertiginous affair, ‘a bit like rock climbing up a slope on a hike in the Appalachians.’  He also told me that once those exterior stairs end, a climber feels utterly precarious. 

Differences in temperature between the building’s cool interior and the sun-warmed roof created downdrafts that could literally suck someone through the opening. 

In what might be read as a blurring of prudence, humility, and reverence, visitors needed to creep toward the roof’s opening on their stomachs in order to peer through its oculus—a full twenty-seven feet across, and known as the ‘eye of God’—down into the space below.”

University of Michigan Professor of Ancient History, Dr. Garrett Ryan, explorers The Pantheon ...