The Pantheon

Most of ancient Rome survives as ruins you have to imagine roofed. The Pantheon is the one major exception: a nearly 1,900-year-old concrete dome that still has its original bronze doors, still has a hole open to the sky at its centre, and on a wet day still lets the rain in, exactly as it always has. It survived because in 609 somebody had the idea of turning a temple to every god into a church for one. This guide walks the building object by object, from the obelisk in the square to the last royal tomb.

A temple to every god, and why it is still standing

Agrippa's Pantheon, and Hadrian's

The building visitors see is not the first Pantheon on the site, and the man named on the front did not build it. Marcus Agrippa — Augustus's son-in-law, admiral and fixer — put up the original around 27–25 BC. It burned in 80 AD, was rebuilt under Domitian, and burned again under Trajan in 110. What stands today is a total reconstruction begun under Trajan or early under Hadrian and finished in Hadrian's reign, most probably between about 114 and 126 AD. Brick stamps in the walls carry the dates; the argument about exactly which emperor gets the credit is still live, and any guide that gives you a single confident year is overselling.

Hadrian had a habit of re-inscribing rebuilt monuments with their original sponsor's name rather than his own, which is why the frieze over the portico still reads, in letters that were once filled with bronze, that Marcus Agrippa built it. He didn't, or at least not this one. It is the most famous misleading credit in architecture, and it fooled scholars until brick stamps settled the question in the nineteenth century.

What the name Pantheon actually meant is less settled than the guidebooks suggest. The obvious reading is a temple to all the gods, and Pliny says as much. Cassius Dio, writing a century later, was already unsure, and offered as an alternative that the name came from the dome resembling the heavens. Nobody has found a list of which gods were worshipped here, or an altar, or the usual apparatus of a Roman temple. It may never have been a conventional temple at all: the leading alternative reading is that it was an imperial audience hall in temple dress, a room in which the emperor sat under an artificial sky.

The day the temple became a church

The building's survival comes down to a single administrative decision. In 609 the Byzantine emperor Phocas gave the derelict temple to Pope Boniface IV, who consecrated it as the church of Sancta Maria ad Martyres — St Mary and the Martyrs. The traditional date is 13 May 609, though some sources give 610 and the year is genuinely contested. Tradition adds that twenty-eight cartloads of martyrs' bones were brought up from the catacombs and placed beneath the altar, which is where the dedication comes from.

Consecration did more than save the roof. It kept the building occupied, maintained and defended for fourteen centuries, through the medieval stripping of bronze and marble from every other Roman monument in the city, through the Renaissance quarrying of ancient sites for building stone, and through the general collapse of everything around it. The Colosseum was a quarry. The Pantheon was a parish. That is the whole difference.

What was taken anyway

Being a church slowed the looting; it did not stop it. The gilded bronze tiles on the outside of the dome went to Constantinople in 663, taken by the emperor Constans II, and were reportedly seized by Saracen pirates before they got there. The really notorious theft came from a pope. In 1625 Urban VIII — Maffeo Barberini — had the bronze trusses stripped out of the portico roof, some 200 tonnes of it, and melted down. Most of it, by the evidence of his own accounts, went into cannon for Castel Sant'Angelo.

Every guide in Rome will tell you the rest of it became Bernini's baldachin over the high altar of St Peter's. The archives say otherwise: the baldachin's bronze was bought in Venice. The story is a nineteenth-century correction that has never caught up with the tour scripts, and we would be repeating the error if we let it stand here. What is certainly true is that Romans at the time believed it, and left a line on the talking statue of Pasquino that has outlived everyone involved: Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini — what the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

The Pantheon rewards being walked rather than glanced at. What follows is the order you actually encounter things, from the square outside to the last tomb on the right.

Piazza della Rotonda, the fountain and the obelisk

Start outside and give the square two minutes before you join the queue. The fountain in front of the building is Giacomo della Porta's, of 1575, one of the first fed by the restored Acqua Vergine aqueduct. The obelisk stuck on top of it is a great deal older than anything else in sight: Egyptian, cut for Ramesses II at Heliopolis, brought to Rome in antiquity for a temple of Isis a few streets away, and re-erected here in 1711 under Clement XI. It is called the Macuteo obelisk after the nearby church of San Macuto, where it had spent the previous few centuries lying about.

The approach, and a building in a hollow

There is no processional approach, and there never was one in the form you get today. The Pantheon appears at the end of ordinary streets, wedged into a dense quarter, and the first sight of it from an alley is one of the better small pleasures of Rome. Look at the base of the columns as you come up to them: the building sits in a hollow, and you step down to it rather than up.

That is not how it was built. Roman ground level here was roughly two metres lower, and the original travertine paving of Agrippa's forecourt survives about 2.4 metres below the modern surface. The portico was approached up a flight of steps, from a colonnaded court, the way a temple should be. Centuries of silt, rubble and rebuilding raised the city around it until the steps were buried and the temple was in a pit; the piazza was dug back down toward portico level in the 1660s, which is why the relationship looks nearly right today rather than absurd.

The portico, and sixteen columns from Egypt

Sixteen monolithic granite shafts hold up the portico: eight across the front, then two rows of four behind. Each is 40 Roman feet — about 11.8 metres — and roughly 1.5 metres thick at the base, weighing on the order of 50 tonnes. They are not built up in drums like most classical columns. Each one is a single piece of stone.

Where that stone came from is the part worth standing still for. The eight grey shafts of the front row were quarried at Mons Claudianus, in Egypt's Eastern Desert, roughly 100 kilometres from the Nile across waterless ground. The eight pink shafts behind came from Aswan. Each was cut, dragged to the river, floated down the Nile, shipped across the Mediterranean, brought up the Tiber and hauled through the streets of Rome. The Corinthian capitals on top are Greek marble from Pentelikon. Nothing about the portico is local, and that was the point: it is a demonstration of reach.

The inscription, and the smaller one under it

The frieze reads M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIVM·FECIT — Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, consul for the third time, made this. Agrippa's third consulship was 27 BC, which dates the claim, not the building.

Almost nobody notices the second inscription. It is on the architrave immediately below, in much smaller letters, and it records a restoration in 202 AD by Septimius Severus and Caracalla, of the Pantheon “ruined by age”, with all its ornament. Two inscriptions, two restorations, and neither of them by the man who actually built what you are standing under.

Two pediments, and the portico that may have gone wrong

This is the single best thing to look up at before you go in, and hardly any guide points it out. Behind the portico's pediment, on the block that joins the porch to the rotunda, there is a second pediment, higher and slightly wider, with nothing under it. The two do not agree with each other, and the join between porch and drum is visibly awkward.

The architectural historian Mark Wilson Jones has argued that the portico was designed for columns of 50 Roman feet, not 40 — and that if you draw it that way, the pediment lands exactly on the ghost pediment behind, and everything resolves. The proposed explanation is that the 50-foot Egyptian shafts, which would have been among the largest ever quarried, never arrived, and the design was rescued with shorter ones. It is a hypothesis rather than a fact, and some scholars point out that stacked pediments occur elsewhere in Roman building without any disaster behind them. Either way, the evidence is up there in plain sight, and once you have seen the mismatch you cannot unsee it.

The bronze doors

The doors are 4.45 metres wide and 7.53 metres high, each leaf weighing something in the order of twenty tonnes, and they are generally accepted as genuinely ancient — second-century Roman work, the oldest monumental bronze doors surviving in the city. They still swing on their original pivots, and you can watch the staff close them at the end of the day with less effort than the size suggests.

You will read in older books that they are a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century replacement. That claim rests on no documentary evidence and appears to be a garbled memory of a cosmetic restoration under Pius IV in the 1560s; analysis of the casting technique and comparison with the doors of the Curia Julia support an ancient date. Put a hand on them on the way in. There is very little else in Rome that is both Roman and still working.

The rotunda: a sphere you can stand inside

Then the room. The interior diameter is 43.3 metres and the height from floor to oculus is 43.3 metres, which means a sphere of that diameter would sit exactly inside the building, touching the floor at one point and the crown of the dome at another. This is not a coincidence noticed later; it is the design. The effect is that the space feels resolved in a way very few interiors do, and it is the reason people go quiet on the way in.

The engineering that allows it is in the concrete itself. Roman builders had no steel, so instead of reinforcing the dome they made it progressively lighter as it rose: dense travertine and basalt aggregate in the foundations and lower walls, then brick and tufa, then porous volcanic scoria near the crown, where the concrete is only about 1.2 metres thick against roughly 6 metres at the base. The walls beneath are not solid either — they are honeycombed with relieving arches and voids that carry the load down through eight great piers.

The coffering

Five rings of twenty-eight sunken panels line the dome, shrinking as they climb. They do the same job as the aggregate: cut weight out of the shell without cutting strength, since what is removed is material that was doing little work. They were almost certainly gilded or picked out in bronze rosettes originally, which would have made the ceiling read as a starred sky rather than the grey it is now.

The count is worth knowing because twenty-eight is not an accident of masonry. It is a perfect number in the ancient sense, equal to the sum of its divisors, and it is the rough length of a lunar month. Whether the builders meant either of those things is unprovable, and this guide will not pretend otherwise, but they knew the arithmetic.

The oculus

At the crown is a hole roughly 8.8 metres across — sources give figures between 8.7 and 9 metres — open to the sky and never glazed in nineteen centuries. It is the building's only light source. It is also structural: the crown of a dome is where the material is most stressed and least useful, and removing it, then ringing the opening with a compression band of brick, makes the whole thing stand more easily rather than less.

The disc of light, and the rain

The oculus turns the building into a slow instrument. On a clear day a sharp disc of sunlight about nine metres across crosses the coffering, drops down the wall, moves over the floor and climbs the far side, and it is genuinely worth staying still for ten minutes to watch it travel. At noon around the summer solstice it falls close to the floor; at the equinoxes it lands on the cornice above the entrance, which several scholars think was deliberate and timed to imperial ceremony.

And when it rains, it rains inside. There is no cover and there never has been. The staff rope off the middle of the floor rather than close the doors, and standing under an open roof in a building older than almost every religion currently practised in Europe is, if you get the weather for it, the best thing that can happen to you in Rome.

The floor, and its twenty-two drains

Look down. The pavement is a grid of squares and circles in yellow giallo antico, purple-veined pavonazzetto, grey granite and porphyry, and the pattern is the ancient one. The material largely is not: roughly two thirds of it was replaced or relaid in 1873, so what you are walking on is a faithful copy with genuine patches.

The clever part is invisible until you know to look. The floor is very slightly convex, rising around 30 centimetres toward the centre, and pierced with twenty-two drainage holes — two directly under the oculus, twenty more out toward the walls. They feed a Roman drain that is still working. Nineteen hundred years of rain has fallen through the roof of this building and been taken away by a system installed by the people who built it.

The niches, the aediculae, and one honest bay

The wall of the rotunda is not a wall so much as eight piers with seven great niches between them, alternating rectangular and semicircular, plus the entrance. Between the niches stand eight aediculae — small marble shrines on columns, with pediments that alternate triangular and curved. In antiquity the niches held statues; today they hold altars, tombs and paintings.

Above them runs the attic storey, and this is where the building was damaged by an improvement. The original Roman attic was a scheme of coloured marble panels with pilasters and sixty-four small capitals. In the mid-eighteenth century, under Benedict XIV and to designs by Paolo Posi, it was destroyed and replaced with the plain squared panels and blank windows you see on most of the circuit. The stripped capitals were sold and are now in London, Potsdam and elsewhere. Every scholar since has called it a disaster.

But one bay was put back. In the 1930s a single section of the attic, above the second niche to the right of the entrance, was reconstructed to the ancient design so that the two could be compared. Find it, look from it to the bays either side, and you can see exactly what was thrown away. Almost no visitor knows it is there.

The apse and the high altar

Directly opposite the door is the apse, which is a Christian addition — the ancient building had a niche here, not a sanctuary. The present high altar and apse decoration are eighteenth-century, done under Clement XI, and the icon above the altar is a seventh-century image of the Virgin and Child, said to have come with the original consecration. It is the oldest object in the building that is not the building.

The Annunciation

In one of the chapels on the right-hand side, in a shallow recess most people walk straight past, is a fresco of the Annunciation usually attributed to Melozzo da Forlì, though some scholars give it to the circle of Antoniazzo Romano. It is the best painting in the building by some distance: an angel entering from the left with a lily, the Virgin turning from her reading desk, the whole thing quiet and unemphatic in a way that fifteenth-century Roman painting rarely manages. Sources disagree about which chapel it is in, so look along the right-hand side rather than counting.

Raphael's tomb

The third aedicula on the left holds Raphael, who died on Good Friday, 6 April 1520, at thirty-seven, and who asked to be buried here rather than in a church of his own. He is in an ancient Roman marble sarcophagus, given by Gregory XVI, beneath an epitaph written by Cardinal Pietro Bembo: Ille hic est Raphael, timuit quo sospite vinci rerum magna parens, et moriente mori — here is that Raphael, by whom, while he lived, great mother Nature feared to be outdone, and at whose death she feared to die herself.

The tomb was opened in September 1833, at the instance of the Virtuosi al Pantheon and with papal authority, partly to settle a rumour that the skull in the Accademia di San Luca was his. It was not; the skeleton was complete and where it should be. It was studied, drawn, and reburied in the sarcophagus you see. Raphael's fiancée Maria Bibbiena, who died before the marriage, is buried to the right.

The Madonna del Sasso

The statue standing in the niche above the tomb is not decoration chosen by the executors. Raphael commissioned it himself, and it was carved in 1524 by Lorenzetto — Lorenzo Lotti — to a design Vasari says was Raphael's own. It is called the Madonna del Sasso, the Madonna of the Rock, from the block of stone under her foot. It is a modest, rather sober piece for a monument to the most famous painter in Europe, which is presumably what he wanted.

The other artists

Raphael set a fashion, and for two centuries the Pantheon was where artists asked to be buried. The painters Annibale Carracci, Taddeo Zuccari, Perino del Vaga and Giovanni da Udine are all here; so is the architect Baldassare Peruzzi, and the sculptor Flaminio Vacca. So, on the right-hand side, is the composer Arcangelo Corelli, who spent his working life in Rome and whose concerti grossi more or less invented the form.

The burials happened because of an institution rather than a fashion. The Confraternity of the Virtuosi al Pantheon was founded in 1542 by a Cistercian, Desiderio da Segni, as a guild of artists attached to this church, recognised by Paul III in the same year. Its early membership reads like an index of the Roman Renaissance — Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, later Bernini, Pietro da Cortona, the Zuccari. It still exists, as the Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts and Letters of the Virtuosi al Pantheon, and it was the Virtuosi who opened Raphael's tomb in 1833.

Victor Emmanuel II

In the first chapel on the right after the entrance is something no ancient Roman and no medieval pope intended: a royal tomb. Victor Emmanuel II, king of Sardinia and then first king of a united Italy, died in 1878 and was buried here under an inscription reading Padre della Patria, father of the fatherland. The great bronze wreath and the eagle above the tomb are of the same date.

Putting him in the Pantheon was a political act and was understood as one. The new Italian state had taken Rome from the papacy only eight years earlier, and burying its first king in the most Roman building in Rome — a church, at that — was a statement about who the successors of antiquity now were.

Umberto I and Queen Margherita

Opposite, his son Umberto I lies with his wife Queen Margherita. Umberto was assassinated at Monza in July 1900 by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci, who had returned from New Jersey specifically to do it. Margherita, who died in 1926, is the queen the pizza is named for, after a Neapolitan pizzaiolo made her one in the colours of the flag in 1889 — a story that is very likely embroidered, and is now unkillable.

The honour guard

You will very likely see two people in black berets and dark cloaks standing quietly by the royal tombs. They are volunteers of the National Institute for the Honour Guard of the Royal Tombs of the Pantheon, an unpaid body founded in 1878 that has kept a watch here ever since, through the referendum that abolished the monarchy in 1946 and everything after. They are usually happy to be asked about it, and they are the only people in the building who will tell you anything without being paid to.

The organ

Almost no guide mentions it. There is a pipe organ in the rotunda, built by Giovanni Tamburini and inaugurated in September 1926, set in a case in the niche to the left of the apse behind the statue of St Erasmus. It is used for the church's own services rather than for concerts, and hearing it in a room whose reverberation was calculated by nobody is worth arranging a Sunday morning around.

A working church, and the rain of roses

The Pantheon is a parish church with a Mass schedule, not a museum with a chapel in it. Mass is celebrated at 5pm on Saturdays and the eve of feast days and at 10.30am on Sundays and holy days; tourist visiting stops while it is on, and anyone coming to worship gets in free. Weddings are held here, which is why you may find part of the floor roped off on a Saturday.

Once a year the roof does something else. On Pentecost Sunday, after the morning Mass, Rome's fire brigade climbs onto the dome and pours thousands of red rose petals through the oculus, so that they drift down through the shaft of light into the rotunda — the tongues of fire of the Holy Spirit, made literal. The custom is medieval in origin, lapsed for centuries, and was revived in 1995. It is spectacular and it is mobbed: if you want to see it, be in the building well before the Mass begins, and expect the piazza to be impassable.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The oculus The roughly 8.8-metre opening at the crown — the only light source, and structurally part of what keeps the dome up. Watch the disc of sunlight move; it is faster than you expect.
• The ghost pediment Look up at the join between porch and rotunda for the second, higher pediment with nothing beneath it — the visible evidence of a design that had to be rescued.
• The bronze doors 4.45 by 7.53 metres, second-century Roman, still hanging in the opening they were cast for and still in daily use.
• The reconstructed attic bay Above the second niche right of the entrance, one section put back to the original Roman design in the 1930s, so you can see what the eighteenth century destroyed everywhere else.
• Raphael's tomb and the Madonna del Sasso Third aedicula on the left: an ancient sarcophagus, an epitaph by Bembo, and a statue Raphael commissioned himself.
• The floor The ancient pattern, subtly domed, with twenty-two drainage holes feeding a Roman drain that still works.
• The royal tombs and their guard Italy's first two kings and Queen Margherita, watched over by unpaid volunteers who have kept the vigil since 1878.
• The Annunciation On the right-hand side, usually given to Melozzo da Forlì — the best painting in the building and the one nobody stops at.

Insider tips

Buy from the state portal, not from a search result. Several commercial operators run sites with Pantheon-like domain names, sell bundled audio guides at several times the entry price, and hand tickets over at an office streets away. The official channel is the national museums portal, and the price is the price above.

Come back to the piazza afterwards rather than trying to do both at once. Piazza della Rotonda is a real square, not just an approach, and a coffee with the facade in front of you in the evening — after the coach groups have gone — is a different building from the one you queued at. Sant'Eustachio and Tazza d'Oro, both a minute away, hold two of Rome's most argued-over claims to the best espresso in the city.

Finally, look for the honour guard and say hello. They are volunteers, they are there because they want to be, and they know more about the last hundred and fifty years of this building than any audio guide will tell you.

Where to stay and eat nearby

The Pantheon sits in the dense historic centre, within easy walking distance of Piazza Navona, the Trevi Fountain and Campo de' Fiori, so almost anywhere in central Rome puts you close. Streets immediately around the piazza are touristy and priced accordingly; walk five minutes toward Campo de' Fiori or into the Jewish Ghetto for better value. Staying in this quarter means the Pantheon is somewhere you pass on the way to dinner, which is the right way to experience it.

More Rome and Vatican churches

• Santa Maria Maggiore — a fifteen-minute taxi ride away, and, since 2025, the resting place of Pope Francis.
• Basilica of San Clemente — three buildings stacked on top of each other, the oldest a first-century Roman house.
• St Peter's Basilica — the largest church in the world, across the river in Vatican City, and the place the Pantheon's bronze is wrongly said to have gone.

See all the churches in this Rome guide →