Saturday, September 19, 2009

Favourite Buildings Visited – The Pantheon in Rome...


This is the first post of some of the favourite buildings and places visited, and photographed, both in Kuwait and elsewhere... The aim is not to provide a comprehensive review of each building, as most of them are fairly well known and information can easily be sourced elsewhere, but to render the somewhat impromptu and personal impression and interpretation of what at each locale caught my attention.



The submission included here is of the Pantheon in Rome, which I visited last in June of this year during a brief stop-over in Rome, almost two decades after my previous visit. As a locale it is still absolutely unique, and which, although never seemingly free of its throngs of tourists, nevertheless manages to reflect an ascetic purity and aura that saturated its weathered marble floors, polished powdery smooth by the centuries worth of visitors, and its tree-trunk like Corinthian columns...



As I walked in a hawk flew in through the ocular and circumnavigated the upper echelons of the rotunda. Unfortunately I wasn't fast enough with my camera to capture it before it flew away, but somehow the act of this bird of prey gliding across the volume seemed befitting this subtly iconic space.

Above and below - photos of the twilight threshold between light from the ocular and shaded interiors of the Pantheon...
The exterior brick wall of the Pantheon...

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