Rome, Italy
Pantheon · PAN-thee-on; in Italian PAN-teh-on
A single round room under a dome of concrete, with a hole nine metres wide open to the sky. It is nineteen hundred years old and it has never fallen down. No one has built a larger dome of plain concrete since.
Photo: Nicholas Hartmann, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You are in a round room as wide as it is high. There are no windows. Light comes from one place only: a circle of open sky straight above you, and under it a bright disc that moves slowly across the wall.
The room was finished about the year 125, under the emperor Hadrian. In China it was the Eastern Han (25–220): at the court in Luoyang the astronomer Zhang Heng was building a bronze sphere of the heavens, turned by water.
The square and the outside are free at all hours. One ticket covers the inside.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| Piazza della Rotonda, fountain and obelisk | Free, always open |
| The porch | Seen free from the square |
| The rotunda and dome | 5 euros on the official page; 7 euros reported since July 2026 |
| The tomb of Raphael | Included |
| The royal tombs | Included |
| The back wall on Via della Palombella | Free; a public street |
Pantheon means "all the gods". It was a temple, and nobody now knows exactly how it was used. Its builders made one great room to stand for the sky, and left the top open.
The dome is concrete, poured over a wooden frame in rings. Nothing is hidden inside it: no iron, no steel. It is 43.3 metres across. That was the widest roof in the world for thirteen hundred years.
In 609 the emperor gave the building to the pope, who made it a church. That is why it was never quarried for stone like the temples around it, and why Mass is still said here.
Before you leave, find the tomb of the painter Raphael, on the left. He asked to lie here.
"It is the Parthenon." The Parthenon is in Athens, is Greek, and is a ruin. This is Roman, about 560 years younger, and whole.
"Agrippa built it, as it says on the front." Agrippa built the first temple here, which burned. Hadrian built this one and put the old founder's name back on it.
"There is glass over the hole." There is nothing. When it rains, it rains inside.
"The rain does not come in, because warm air pushes it out." It comes in. The floor is made for it: look for the small holes.
"It is a museum." It is a Catholic church, Saint Mary and the Martyrs. On Sunday morning visitors wait outside until Mass is over.
The stops begin in the square, go in through the porch and end at the back wall, outside.
Stand by the fountain and look at the ground. The square slopes down towards the building. In Hadrian's time the street was several metres lower, and you climbed a flight of steps to the porch. Rome has risen round the Pantheon.
The fountain was made in 1575. The small obelisk on top is Egyptian, cut for the pharaoh Ramesses II about 1250 BC, brought to Rome for a temple of Isis, and set here in 1711.
Sixteen columns hold up the porch. Each is a single piece of granite, almost twelve metres tall and about sixty tonnes in weight. They were quarried in the eastern desert of Egypt, dragged a hundred kilometres to the Nile, floated to the sea, shipped to Italy and hauled up the Tiber.
Read the big letters: M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIVM·FECIT. "Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, consul for the third time, made this." Agrippa was the friend and general of the first emperor, Augustus. His temple of about 25 BC burned in the year 80, and the one built in its place burned in 110.
Look up inside the porch. The roof beams are bare wood. They were once cased in bronze. In 1625 Pope Urban VIII, of the Barberini family, took the bronze to cast cannon. Romans said: "What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did."
The two bronze doors are about seven metres high. They are ancient, and may be the ones hung in Hadrian's day. Each leaf weighs several tonnes and still turns on its pivots.
Walking through, you pass from a square porch into a round room. The two parts do not quite fit. Look back at the wall above the porch roof and you can see the outline of a second, higher gable. The porch may have been planned for taller columns that never arrived.
The room is 43.3 metres wide and 43.3 metres high. A ball of that size would sit exactly inside it, touching the floor.
The wall that carries the dome is six metres thick. The dome itself is about six metres thick where it starts and little more than one metre at the top. The builders changed the recipe as they went up: heavy stone in the concrete at the bottom, then brick, then light volcanic stone full of bubbles near the eye.
The sunken squares are called coffers. There are 140 of them, in five rings of twenty-eight. They make the dome lighter, and they make it look deeper than it is.
The opening is called the oculus, the eye. It is about nine metres across. It is the only source of light, and it is also what holds the dome together: its ring of brick takes the push of the concrete from all sides, like the keystone of an arch.
Watch the disc of sunlight. It works as a clock and a calendar. In winter it stays high on the dome. In summer it reaches the floor. At noon on 21 April, the day Romans kept as the birthday of their city, it falls on the doorway.
At Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, firemen climb onto the roof after Mass and pour thousands of red rose petals through the eye.
The floor is laid in circles and squares of coloured stone brought from every corner of the empire: purple from Egypt, yellow from Tunisia, white and violet from Turkey. The pattern is Hadrian's, relaid in 1873.
It is not flat. It rises a little in the middle so that rainwater runs outward. Near the centre are twenty-two small holes that take the water down to a Roman drain, which still works.
On the left side, between two chapels, a shrine holds a statue of the Virgin and Child. Raphael paid for it in his will. Under it, behind glass, is a Roman stone coffin with his bones.
The Latin lines on the coffin were written by his friend, the poet Pietro Bembo. They say: here lies Raphael; while he lived, Nature feared he would outdo her, and when he died, she feared she would die too.
In 1833 people began to doubt that he was really here. The floor was opened in front of a crowd of artists. A skeleton was found, measured, drawn, and put back.
Simple, erect, severe, austere, sublime— Shrine of all saints and temple of all gods, From Jove to Jesus—spared and blest by time
Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, canto IV, 1818
Opposite each other across the room are the tombs of the first two kings of united Italy. Victor Emmanuel II died in 1878. His son Umberto I was shot by an anarchist in 1900 and lies with his queen, Margherita, for whom the pizza is named. Volunteers still stand guard beside them.
When you come out, turn left and walk round the building. The round wall is plain brick, with great arches built into it to carry the weight down to eight piers. From the street behind you can see how low and wide the dome really is.
Old prints show two small bell towers on the front. They were added in the 1620s and Romans called them "the ass's ears". They were taken down in 1883.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| about 25 BC | Agrippa builds the first temple here | Western Han (206 BC–AD 9) China (202 BC–AD 8): the historian Sima Qian has been dead about sixty years |
| about 125 | Hadrian's building is finished | Eastern Han China: Zhang Heng builds his water-driven sphere; twenty years earlier Cai Lun presented paper to the court |
| 609 | The temple becomes a church | Sui China (581–618): the Grand Canal is being dug, and the Zhaozhou Bridge, a stone arch that still stands, is new |
| 663 | A Byzantine emperor strips the gilded bronze tiles from the roof | Tang China (618–907); Tang and Silla defeat a Japanese fleet off Korea in the same year |
| 1520 | Raphael is buried here | Ming China (1368–1644), the Zhengde reign; Magellan's ships find the strait at the foot of South America |
| 1625 | The pope takes the bronze from the porch for cannon | The last decades of the Ming (1368–1644); in England Charles I comes to the throne |
| 1878 | The first king of Italy is buried here | Qing China, the Guangxu reign; Edison is at work on the electric lamp |
| 2023 | A ticket is charged for the first time | China's first large airliner, the C919, carries its first paying passengers |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
A wizard made a bargain with the devil and then cheated him of his soul by taking refuge in the church. The devil, in his rage, ran round and round the building, and his feet wore the ditch that lies about its walls.
Source: Medieval Roman tale, told in the Mirabilia tradition
When the pope blessed the temple as a church in 609, the demons who had lived in it as gods fled upward in a rush and burst through the top of the dome. The hole they made is the eye.
Source: Medieval Roman legend
To build the dome, the emperor had the room filled to the top with earth, mixed with gold coins, and the concrete was laid over it. When it was dry he told the people they could keep whatever they dug out, and the room was empty in a day.
Source: Roman popular tradition, recorded by travellers from the sixteenth century
When the temple became a church, the pope had the bones of martyrs brought from the burial tunnels outside the city, twenty-eight cartloads of them, and laid under the altar.
Source: Church tradition, first written down centuries after 609
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The page of the state museums of Rome (direzionemuseiroma.cultura.gov.it), hours, prices and rules as shown in November 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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