buildings. The front of the temple typically carried an inscription saying who had built it, cut into the stone with a "V" section. This was filled with brightly coloured paint, usually scarlet or vermilion. In major imperial monuments the letters were cast in lead and held in by pegs, then also painted or gilded. These have usually long vanished, but archaeologists can generally reconstruct them from the peg-holes, and some have been re-created and set in place. There was considerable local variation in style, as Roman architects often tried to incorporate elements the population expected in its sacred architecture. This was especially the case in Egypt and the Near East, where different traditions of large stone temples were already millennia old. The Romano-Celtic temple was a simple style, usually with little use of stone, for small temples found in the Western Empire, and by far the most common type in Roman Britain, where they were usually square, with an ambulatory. It often lacked any of the distinctive classical features, and may have had considerable continuity with pre-Roman temples of the Celtic religion. Circular plans Romano-Celtic temples were often circular, and circular temples of various kinds were built by the Romans. Greek models were available in tholos shrines and some other buildings, as assembly halls and various other functions. Temples of the goddess Vesta, which were usually small, typically had this shape, as in those at Rome and Tivoli (see list), which survive in part. Like the Temple of Hercules Victor in Rome, which was perhaps by a Greek architect, these survivors had an unbroken colonnade encircling the building, and a low, Greek-style podium. Different formulae were followed in the Pantheon, Rome and a small temple at Baalbek (usually called the "Temple of Venus"), where the door is behind a full portico, though very different ways of doing this are used. In the Pantheon only the portico has columns, and the "thoroughly uncomfortable" exterior meeting of the portico and circular cella are often criticised. At Baalbek, a wide portico with a broken pediment is matched by four other columns round the building, with the architrave in scooped curving sections, each ending in a projection supported by a column. At Praeneste (modern Palestrina) near Rome, a huge pilgrimage complex of the 1st century BC led visitors up several levels with large buildings on a steep hillside, before they eventually reached the sanctuary