Piazza della Rotonda Piazza della Rotonda The Piazza della Rotonda is a piazza (city square) in Rome, Italy, on the south side of which is located the Pantheon. The square gets its name from the Pantheon's informal title as the church of "Santa Maria Rotonda". Although the Pantheon has stood from antiquity, the area in front of it had over the centuries become choked with a maze of sheds and small shops that had grown up around its columns. These medieval accretions were cleared by order of Pope Eugenius IV (1431–39) and the piazza was laid out and paved. It took its name
The Piazza Tales to Melville's whaling years, during which he visited the Galapagos Islands, supplemented with material from his reading in at least six books of Pacific voyages, including "The Voyage of the Beagle" by Charles Darwin. A month after the collection was published, Melville's old friend Richard Tobias Greene, on whom Toby in "Typee" was based, wrote him a letter expressing how the Encantadas sketches "had called up reminiscences of days gone by". Assuming that "The Piazza" is Melville's own Pittsfield piazza, critic F. O. Matthiessen suggests that the piece must have been suggested by Hawthorne's manse. As the setting for the