Eternal, city of spirit, of the people, of pilgrims and princes, sacred and irreverent, pleasure-seeking, caput mundi: so have the poets of every era described Rome and much more. Declarations of love with the impulsiveness of lightning strikes and invectives that echo like the thunder of a summer storm, composed in verse and prose, transcribed, translated, engraved, and sculpted, elevated in architectural masterpieces within which we still live today or displayed beneath the statue of Pasquino – passing by there to believe it.
Two thousand seven hundred seventy-seven years, not written as one word but we take the liberty to do so because it better conveys the idea of this greatness which, from the founding of Rome by Romulus on April 21, 753 BC, is long-lived because it has the peculiarity of resisting while changing, of welcoming without holding back.
Have you ever entered a bar in the center, one of those that look a bit rundown from the outside but inside have frescoed vaults, where tourists stop for a pizza with mortadella (pizza and mortazza, as it’s said here, a heritage of Roman urban-pop tradition) and the lady coming out of the hair salon grabs a coffee while waiting for lunchtime? From there still pass those characters who alone resemble us, are children of our time, and together become actors in an ancient comedy of almost three millennia. That’s the beauty of the world to savor with the animula vagula blandula – the wandering, languid soul – of which Emperor Hadrian says he feels responsible in the Memoirs that Marguerite Yourcenar compiled for him centuries later. It seemed so true in the fragments of this everyday life that we wanted to imprint it in the Pantheon collection.
From the two earrings, the large ones and the Domes that describe its profile, to the Little ones to be worn like a symbol, from the pendant that exalts a section of the vault seen from the inside, to the harmonious geometry of the contrarié ring. We feel it walking on the wide, airy streets that in the morning merge into perspective with the sky, which is almost always clear here; we touch it when we lean against a column of the Rotunda or lie in the sun on the green slope of the Tiber Island or Villa Borghese; it overwhelms us when the golden light of sunset floods the alleys where getting lost is a pleasure. For us, it has the perfect shape of the world’s largest hemispherical dome, and our new Seal celebrates it by synthesizing in scale its magnificent system with five orders and twenty-eight dynamically projected decreasing coffers towards the central oculus.
From the legend of its first day to the motto “Rome wasn’t built in a day” which has persisted since the Middle Ages in common speech, the Birthday of Rome is among the celebrations that we absolutely cannot miss. This year, we chose to celebrate it by putting on your finger the very symbol of the regality of the Caesars who, on April 21, at exactly noon, triumphantly crossed the colossal bronze door of the Pantheon and greeted the capital in celebration, shining in a beam of light that only at that hour and only on this date, bows in one of the most astonishing theatrical strokes in history.
