Rome\'s Awesome Openings

By Adria Mallin Posted on History

Awe before the majesty and mystery of existence – that feeling of wanting to sink to one's knees in gratitude for having been present – is in my DNA, I suspect, and travel is a fine conduit for such moments. So ask me my favorite place, and a panoply of favorites plays freely across the wide screen of memory.

Yet somehow, it is always Rome, the Eternal City, calling to me. If Rome is diffuse and without a single center, no matter; she is all center. While tourists on their three-day whirlwinds tick off the sights, I have had the good fortune to live in Rome, twice, with the luxury of slow time. On some days I would simply let in the tumult of Rome's streets, or follow the mellifluous fall of her fountains. I could gaze repeatedly at her rooflines of gesticulating saints, or from vantage points in her seven hills, try to identify the multitude of church domes, one by one by one. On other days I might consciously walk her shallow Renaissance steps of marble and travertine – noble steps, elegant steps, curving steps. There were even days when I went from church to church to sketch the putti, cherubs direct from ethereal regions. On your next visit to Rome, perhaps you, too, will partner with slow time and reflect upon three awesome openings in the Eternal City.

La Bocca della Verita, or The Mouth of Truth

The Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin was founded in the 6th century on the ruins of a food distribution center of classical Rome, and later enlarged by Pope Hadrian I and given to the Greek community living near the Tiber. Outside, beneath its portico, is the Bocca Della Verita, or Mouth of Truth. There may be good reason to look inside at the choir or the rich pavements and decorations, but the truth is, everybody stands outside, waiting for a chance at the Bocca.  

Why the draw? This is an ancient drain covering, a huge disc, which a clever artist carved into the face of the sea god Oceanus. If any liar were rash enough to place his hand inside the gaping mouth of the god, the jaws were said to snap shut. Ha!

Even at 5:30 p.m., even in the cold, there were about 20 people standing in line to put their hands in the mouth and test the tale. Most of them were little boys whose parents stood ready with their VCRs. They clowned, pretending for the cameras that they couldn't get their hands back while their parents ran through a laundry list of the children's peccadillos. Each time an adult came to the hole of the sea god's mouth, he seemed to have felt a pang of fear and remorse, tentatively put a hand in the mouth, and showed a shy look of relief when reclaiming the hand. No adult believes this stuff, but I am telling you, when you feed your hand to the sea god with the weight of history and myth and religion and superstition bearing down on you, you do wonder if you should risk your hand at all.  

The Oculus of the Pantheon

Everyone passes the Pantheon on the way from here to there in Rome. People arrange to meet in front of it, they sit on its steps, and they gaze at the inscription on the architrave which reads "M Agrippa L f cos tertium fecit" or "Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, third time consul, made this temple."  

This best preserved and most intact monument of ancient Rome, survivor of the perils of 19 centuries, was originally constructed in 27 B.C. by Agrippa and rebuilt by the Emperor Hadrian in 125 A.D. The great portico is supported by eight monolithic granite columns with marble capitals and bases, and connects to the rotunda by a massive brickwork structure. One enters through gigantic bronze doors – the originals – and remembers suddenly that there were once veneers of precious marbles within, pure gold tiles on the roof, and that the bronze doors were themselves once covered with plates of beaten gold.

Inside the temple is a cavernous architectural space with a cylindrical wall supporting the cupola, or dome. The wall is 17 feet thick, and the cupola, with its 142-foot diameter, is the largest vault ever constructed in masonry. (St. Peter's dome is only 138 feet in diameter.) There is a progressive narrowing of the five coffered rows of the cupola's interior, so that the eye is drawn to the center. And up, up, up to a feature called the oculus.

Ah, the oculus. This is a nine-meter hole in the top of the Pantheon. Nothing on the exterior – nothing short of an aerial view from a helicopter – could prepare a visitor for this hole. In a building of harmony and balance, the hole opens up the vault to the sky and becomes, simply stated, divine.

When I was struck by the celestial, I hadn't yet opened my guidebook. I walked around the Pantheon and as I looked up, a shaft of blinding white light made me gasp. It hit a geometric disk of the rows of coffers, and electrified a disk on the floor, accomplishing an instantaneous transmogrification from the architectural to the spiritual.  

In her Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar speaks of "this open and secret temple, conceived as a sundial. The hours were to circle the center of its carefully polished pavement where the disk of the day was supposed to rest like a golden buckle; the rain would make a limpid pool from which a prayer could transpire like smoke toward the void where we place the gods."

Put less poetically, the 30-foot hole in the ceiling performs like a sundial, and is the building's only source of light. Or air. It symbolizes a union between earth and sky that would allow man's prayer to ascend to the heavens unimpeded.

To experience the sundial effect, I have returned to the Pantheon at different times of day, to feel a white or a golden light descending, to watch the clouds moving across the opening of blue, or to feel by sound and sense a heavy rain, carried away into a, almost invisible drain channel in the articulated flooring of Agrippa. I will be back someday to experience a snowfall – rare, perhaps, but would it not descend into the temple like the Holy Spirit itself. . .

The Keyhole of the Knights of Malta

My daughter and I asked a good Roman friend what he would do with a beautiful late afternoon in Rome that wouldn't be in all the guidebooks, and he sent us to the Circo Massimo stop on the Metro, Line B and up the Aventine Hill to find a keyhole in a door through which the dome of St. Peter's in the Vatican, several miles away, would be revealed. We got off at the Metro stop and walked around the ruins, watching the play of the late afternoon sun on the ancient stone, then headed up the Aventine Hill. This is a huff-and-puff sort of hill even if you are in good shape, but we knew that it would be worth the pulmonary gasps now for the aesthetic gasp to follow.

We found one wall after another with gates and secret garden sorts of doors. One was the entrance for the Church of Santa Sabina, on our destination list. Next, we found the beautiful gardens with the orange groves – a thoroughly welcome sight after a long winter. Here, we watched young lovers embrace, children and their mothers or nannies at play, and boys practicing to be famous Italian soccer players.  

We rested our elbows on a convenient ledge overlooking the city. We had walked by every possible door in the area, checking for keyholes, looking through any apparent hole. To no avail. Still, we were not sure what we had missed since we could see St. Peter's from almost everywhere on the hill. There was a big sky and a big dome dominating the horizon. Nice. Grand. Expected.

Finally, we gave up, but periodically, we would sort of mutter under our breath, "Where do you think that keyhole could have been?

Much later, heading for the airport on my way back to the States, as the taxi approached the Circus Maximus in the morning traffic, I told my driver that I had climbed the Aventine Hill, wandered amid the orange groves, walked about the Church of Santa Sabina, and looked high and low for the little keyhole through which one can see St. Peter's. He asked if I had finally found it, and I admitted that I hadn't.  

My plane was not scheduled to depart for another two hours, and he said, gallantly, "I will show you." Up the hill he drove, at a considerably faster clip than a walking rate, past the formal orange groves behind the gate, past the Chiesa di Santa Sabina, past more orange groves, and now, one dark door and high wall, another dark door and wall, and he stopped the cab. He jumped out, sprang toward the door, stops, bent forward, and announced proudly, "Ecco!"  

He opened my taxi door, I jumped out, I sprang towards the door next to the polished brass plate about 2"x 3" marked "Consiglio di Malta," and bent forward to the spot where he was pointing. It was a hole, perhaps an inch in diameter.  

I put my eye to the teeny, tiny brass-bound peephole in the garden door of the Knights of Malta, and lo and behold! the perfect dome of St. Peter's appeared in the early sun, perfectly miniaturized, and perfectly framed by green hedge.

When we arrived at the airport, the driver asked me if I would mind stopping first at Terminal B where he had to pick something up. Minutes later, he hopped back in the cab, bent over to write something, and turned around to hand it to me. It was an oversized postcard of the view through the keyhole, and he had signed it, "Ritorna a Roma! Arrivederci! Taxi driver."

Isn't that Rome? Always making you a gift?