Pack up today - at least later. First we saw a building on our first day that intrigued us. It was labelled Santa Maria degli Angeli e Martires. The front of this basilica was a broken circle.
The Basilica sits on the Piazza della Repubblica and one end of the Via Nazionale, at the other end of which (sorta, there is a jog in the street to avoid a significant? building ) sits the Vittorio Emanuelle, which is visible from the Piazza.
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| Each side of the Via Nazionale has a curved building around the road and Fountain |
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| Across the piazza |
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| The fountain |
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| Part of the Baths of Diocletian |
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| The anti-chamber of the basilica, the dome is original although the pater painted on may not be. |
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| Looking up at the dome and the central lantern. This would have been open in the roman period. |
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| This is a vast space |
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| The Altar |
The meridian line[edit]
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Pope Clement XI commissioned the astronomer, mathematician, archaeologist, historian and philosopher Francesco Bianchini to build a meridian line, a sort of sundial, within the basilica. Completed in 1702, the object had a threefold purpose: the pope wanted to check the accuracy of the Gregorian reformation of the calendar, to produce a tool to predict Easter exactly, and, not least, to give Rome a meridian line as important as the one Giovanni Domenico Cassini had recently built in Bologna's cathedral, San Petronio. Alan Cook remarked, "The disposition, the stability and the precision are much better than those of the famous meridian... in Bologna".[1]
This church was chosen for several reasons: (1) Like other baths in Rome, the building was already naturally southerly oriented, so as to receive unobstructed exposure to the sun; (2) the height of the walls allowed for a long line to measure the sun's progress through the year more precisely; (3) the ancient walls had long since stopped settling into the ground, ensuring that carefully calibrated observational instruments set in them would not move out of place; and (4) because it was set in the former baths of Diocletian, it would symbolically represent a victory of the Christian calendar over the earlier pagan calendar.
Bianchini's sundial was built along the meridian that crosses Rome, at longitude 12° 30' E. At solar noon, which varies according to the equation of time from around 10:54 a.m. UTCin late October to 11.24 a.m. UTC in February (11:54 to 12:24 CET),[2] the sun shines through a small hole in the wall to cast its light on this line each day. At the summer solstice, the sun appears highest, and its ray hits the meridian line at the point closest to the wall. At the winter solstice, the ray crosses the line at the point furthest from the wall. At eitherequinox, the sun touches the line between the these two extremes. The longer the meridian line, the more accurately the observer can calculate the length of the year. The meridian line built here is 45 meters long and is composed of bronze, enclosed in yellow-white marble.
In addition to using the line to measure the sun's meridian crossing, Bianchini also added holes in the ceiling to mark the passage of stars. Inside the interior, darkened by covering the windows, Polaris, Arcturus and Sirius were observed through these holes with the aid of a telescope to determine their right ascensions and declinations.[3] The meridian line was restored in 2002 for the tricentenary of its construction, and it is still operational today.
(From wikipedia)
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| The meridian line as photographed by me |
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| Up at the top of this photo is the hole the suns ray comes in through (the dot in the shield above the arch) |
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| Two statues in the wing where the organ is. The far statue has a strong resemblance to some Etruscan statues we have seen. |
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| This great organ was being repaired and retuned |
Peter and Marguerita
