“That information comes like the call of the conductor to change cars, just as one has comfortably settled down on the train.  We must forget all about Agrippa and Augustus, and remember that this building was built by Hadrian.  But it turns out that in 609 Boniface turned it into a Christian church.  Which Boniface?  The Pantheon was adorned with bronze columns.  If you wish to see them you must go to St. Peter’s, where they are a part of the high altar.  So Baedeker says, but I’m told that isn’t correct either.  When you go inside you see that you must let by-gones be by-gones.  You are confronted with the tomb of Victor Emmanuel and set to thinking on the recent glories of the House of Savoy.  Really to appreciate the Pantheon you must be well-posted in nineteenth-century history.  You keep up this train of thought till you happen to stumble on the tomb of Raphael.  That, of course, is what you ought to have come to see in the first place.

“When you look at the column of Trajan you naturally think of Trajan, you follow the spiral which celebrates his victories, till you come to the top of the column; and there stands St. Peter as if it were his monument.  You meditate on the column of Marcus Aurelius, and look up and see St. Paul in the place of honor.

“I must confess that I have had difficulty about the ruins.  Brick, particularly in this climate, doesn’t show its age.  I find it hard to distinguish between a ruin and a building in the course of construction.  When I got out of the station I saw a huge brick building across the street, which had been left unfinished as if the workmen had gone on strike.  I learned that it was the remains of the Baths of Diocletian.  Opening a door I found myself in a huge church, which had a long history I ought to have known something about, but didn’t.

“Now read this, and try to take it in:  ’Returning to the Cancelleria, we proceed to the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori, where the vegetable market is held in the morning, and where criminals were formerly executed.  The bronze statue of the philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was burned here as a heretic in 1600, was erected in 1889.  To the east once lay the Theatre of Pompey.  Behind it lay the Porticus of Pompey where Caesar was murdered, B.C. 44.’

“It economizes space to have the vegetable market and the martyrdom of Giordano Bruno and the assassination of Julius Caesar all close together.  But they are too close.  The imagination hasn’t room to turn round.  Especially as the market-women are very much alive and cannot conceive that any one would come into the Piazza unless he intended to buy vegetables.  Somehow the great events you have read about don’t seem to have impressed themselves on the neighborhood.  At any rate, you are conscious that you are the only person in the Piazza Campo de’ Fiori who is thinking about Giordano Bruno or Julius Caesar; while the price of vegetables is as intensely interesting as it was in the year 1600 A.D. or in 44 B.C.