Mysteries of Rome

born to be a pagan temple, it was dedicated to all gods. It also represents a symbol dear to the Masons. The legends: 1- According to a Roman popular tradition the shallow moat surrounding the Pantheon building was not excavated by human hands. It is said that one day the devil awaited the pledge of the magician Pietro Bailardo for his services. The latter once out of the Pantheon paid the devil with only four nuts and then took refuge in the church. So that the devil, angry at the outrage he suffered, sank among the flames in the bowels of the Earth, creating the furrow called the "moat of the devil". 2- The Phantom of Umberto Primo Not everyone knows that today the pantheon houses the bodies of the King of Italy. They are buried in some niches that once housed the planetary deities (Moon, Sun, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn). Legend has it that the ghost of Umberto I, the king murdered in Monza in 1900, appears in the Pantheon in some special circumstances. In 1930, for example, the ghost of the King approached a guard soldier to give him a message that has remained secret to this day. Hidden above one of the capitals of the columns that form the pronaos (entrance to the temple) is a very small barberina bee engraved in the stone, symbol of Pope Urban VIII Barberini who had wanted the reconstruction of the column. This detail, often overlooked by tourists, must be carefully discovered by looking upwards.

Inside the neo-gothic church that stands on the Lungotevere, there is a really special small museum, as here some testimonies of the afterlife of the deceased and their contacts with the living relatives were collected at the end of the nineteenth century. The initiative was taken by a French missionary who, after a brutal fire in the church, thought he saw on the walls the suffering face of a deceased soul, imprisoned in the flames. He decided to turn Europe to collect these particular testimonies, gathered here and jealously guarded.