Milestones and millstones

Rome

They say that the invading Barbarians were so overwhelmed by the Pantheon’s beauty that they didn’t take it apart brick by brick. It is, of course, the most perfectly symmetrical monument, along with the Parthenon, to have survived since antiquity, the former lucky enough not to have been blown up à la latter. The Pantheon is a perfect space, the diameter of its rotunda exactly the same as its height, 142 feet. It sits in the middle of the bend in the Tiber that cradles Rome’s historical centre, halfway between the Vatican and Capitoline Hill, its low dome rising only slightly above the rooftops. I am here admiring this great work of art because my son John-Taki rents rooms around the corner, in the Palazzo Orsini, and it is near here where my daughter-in-law, Asia, has just given birth to my first grandson, Taki-Tancredi. Becoming a grandfather is a milestone as well as a millstone — can you picture anything more ridiculous than trying to chat up a young woman while a child is screaming, ‘Grandpa, Grandpa, come and look at the ducks…’