Anyone arriving at the Pantheon today finds two surprises, and neither of them is in the older guidebooks.
The first is that you have to pay, and for a few weeks now you have had to pay more than before: the ticket went from 5 to 7 euros on 1 July 2026. For two thousand years the Pantheon was the one great monument in Rome you could walk into for nothing, and generations of travellers used it as a shelter from the rain and the heat. That era ended in 2023, and most of the articles you find online still do not know it.
The second is that it is a church, consecrated and in use, with regular Masses and a parish priest. Not a former temple converted into a museum: a Catholic church called Santa Maria ad Martyres, containing the tomb of Raphael and those of the kings of Italy.
Those two facts together explain everything else, ticket included. Let’s see why.
If you want the wider context, the Pantheon is one of the three pillars of imperial Rome I wrote about in this brief history of art in Rome.
The dome nobody managed to match for a thousand years
Go in, look up, and hold on to one number: 43.44 metres.
That is the diameter of the Pantheon’s dome, and it is the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. Not “one of the largest”, not “the largest in antiquity”: the largest, still today, nineteen centuries on. For comparison, the dome of St Peter’s measures 42.52 metres and Hagia Sophia 31.24. Michelangelo, with the whole of the sixteenth century at his disposal, came in ninety centimetres short.
So how does it stand up? Not by miracle, by engineering. The secret is that the Pantheon’s concrete is not the same throughout: its composition changes as it rises. Low down the aggregate is heavy, with chips of travertine and tufa; halfway up it becomes tufa and fragments of brick; and in the upper part, towards the oculus, the Romans used volcanic pumice, an extremely light aggregate.
In other words: the dome becomes progressively lighter where the weight matters most, at the top. Add to that the thickness, which decreases as it rises, and the coffers, which are not merely decorative: by hollowing out the inner surface they remove weight without removing strength.
It is a structural problem solved, not a mystery. And that is why it deserves admiration rather than amazement: somebody calculated it.
One detail to look for in the coffers: there are five rows of twenty-eight, and they shrink as your eye travels upwards, which makes the dome look taller than it is. Twenty-eight is not accidental: the ancients considered it a perfect number, because it equals the sum of its divisors (1+2+4+7+14). In a building dedicated to all the gods, the number was part of the message.
The oculus, and what happens when it rains
At the centre of the dome there is a hole nine metres across. It is not covered by glass, it is not covered by anything: it is open to the sky.
The oculus is the building’s only source of light, and over the course of the day its disc of sunlight moves across the wall and the floor like the hand of a clock. It is also why the Pantheon is one of the few monuments where it pays to go in bad weather: on rainy days a visible column of water comes down through the oculus, and in a hard winter snow can come in too.
But doesn’t it flood? No, and here is the concrete detail that hardly anyone mentions. The floor of the Pantheon is slightly convex, higher at the centre than at the edges, and at the centre there are twenty-two drainage holes that collect the water and feed it into an ancient drainage system. Look for them: they are there, in the marble, among the people photographing the dome.
Which means the oculus is not a compromise or a failure: it is designed, with its own plumbing. Two thousand years later it still works.
The inscription that lies
Now go back outside, under the portico, and read the frieze. It says:
M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIVM·FECIT
Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, consul for the third time, built this. It looks settled. It is not.
Agrippa, Augustus’s son-in-law, built his Pantheon between 27 and 25 BC. That building burned in AD 80, was restored, and burned again around 110. What you are looking at is the reconstruction ordered by Hadrian, carried out roughly between AD 112 and 128: a completely different building, with the circular plan and the dome that Agrippa’s building did not have.
So why does it say Agrippa? Because Hadrian put the original inscription back. It is a gesture his contemporaries understood perfectly: rebuilding a public building and restoring the founder’s name to it was an act of pietas, not of modesty. Hadrian did not need to sign it: the people who counted knew.
The result, for us, is the most elegant trap in Rome. The best-preserved Roman monument in the world carries a date on its façade that is a hundred and fifty years wrong, and it fooled us for centuries.
Look at the columns of the portico too: they are granite monoliths, sixteen of them, brought from Egypt. They are not stacked drums, they are single pieces, which tells you what that building was worth in terms of imperial logistics.
What the barbarians did not do
There is a Roman saying that sums up the history of this building better than a chapter would: quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini. What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini did.
The story is more layered than it is usually told, though, and it is worth separating two different acts of stripping, a thousand years apart.
The first: the dome was covered on the outside with gilded bronze tiles. In 663 the eastern emperor Constans II, visiting Rome, ordered them removed and had them shipped to Constantinople. The covering was not replaced with lead until 735. So the biggest act of spoliation was not a pope’s: it was a Christian emperor’s.
The second is the one behind the saying: in August 1625 word went round Rome that Pope Urban VIII Barberini had decided to melt down the bronze of the portico’s beams. It went into cannon for Castel Sant’Angelo. And here is the part that needs saying honestly: popular history adds that some of that bronze ended up in Bernini’s baldachin in St Peter’s, but the documented destination is the artillery, eighty cannon, and recent scholarship treats the link to the baldachin as a deliberately fabricated story, because saying that bronze had become a sacred work sounded better than admitting it had become artillery. I go into it in more detail in the article on St Peter’s Basilica.
Either way, the point of the saying holds. The Pantheon came through the invasions intact and lost its bronze to the people who were administering it.
Raphael, buried in a pagan temple
On the left, in the third aedicule, is the tomb of Raphael, who died on 6 April 1520 at the age of thirty-seven.
He asked to be buried here, and the request says everything about the prestige of the place: by the sixteenth century the Pantheon was already regarded as the perfect building, the model every architect studied. Being buried inside the archetype was a statement.
On the slab there is an inscription worth reading standing right in front of it. The two elegiac lines at the bottom are the famous part:
ILLE HIC EST RAPHAEL TIMUIT QUO SOSPITE VINCI / RERUM MAGNA PARENS ET MORIENTE MORI
Here lies that Raphael, by whom, while he lived, the great mother of all things feared to be outdone, and at whose death she feared to die herself. Nature in person, frightened by a painter. It is the most brazen couplet of the Renaissance, and it is traditionally attributed to Pietro Bembo, although current scholarship gives it rather to Antonio Tebaldeo.
A detail you can read on the slab and that always gets missed: the inscription says that Raphael died on the same day he was born. It was a symmetry his contemporaries found moving, and it went straight into the legend of the artist.
The same church also holds the tombs of Victor Emmanuel II and of Umberto I with Queen Margherita: the Pantheon is at once a Roman temple, a Catholic church and the mausoleum of the kings of Italy. Three layers in a single building, which is why it is argued about so often.
If Raphael interests you beyond the tomb, I have written about the irony hidden in the School of Athens.
Since when you pay, and who still gets in free
The ticket arrived in the summer of 2023, after years of argument, under an agreement between the Ministry of Culture and the Diocese of Rome: the Pantheon is state property but it is also a basilica in use, so a convention was needed.
And where does the money go? The split is public and worth knowing: 70% to the Ministry, 30% to the Diocese of Rome. The Ministry takes on ordinary and extraordinary maintenance and the cleaning; the Diocese uses its share for charitable and cultural work and for the upkeep and restoration of state-owned churches in its territory. So your ticket, in part, restores other churches in Rome.
Since 1 July 2026 the full price is 7 euros, up from the original 5, under a new convention between the two parties. Reductions and exemptions were left unchanged.
Still free, with a document in hand:
- under 18s;
- residents of the Comune di Roma, the broadest category and the fairest: for Romans the Pantheon is a neighbourhood church;
- the categories set out in DM 507/1997, including teachers accompanying school groups;
- everybody, on the first Sunday of the month, collecting the free ticket at the desks;
- anyone entering for worship: during Mass access is free, and admission is limited to worshippers.
Young people aged 18 to 25 pay 2 euros.
Practical information
Details verified on 30 July 2026 on the official page of the Italian Ministry of Culture. Before you travel, check again on cultura.gov.it, and remember that official sales go through the Museiitaliani platform, its app, the ticket desks and the automated kiosks on site.
Opening hours. Daily 9 am to 7 pm, last entry at 6.30 pm; the ticket desks close at 6 pm, so do not turn up at 6.20 expecting to buy a ticket. Closed on 25 December and 1 January, barring special openings.
Booking. It is optional, and there is something to know here: on the official channel skip-the-line tickets do not exist. If a reseller sells you “priority access”, what you are actually buying is a ticket already issued, which saves you the queue at the desk but does not put you ahead of anyone at the door. It is not a scam, but it helps to know what you are paying for.
Masses. Saturdays and the eve of feast days at 5 pm, Sundays and feast days at 10.30 am. During services only worshippers go in, and ticket sales stop one hour before liturgical activities. If your only free slot is Sunday morning, factor that in.
Getting there. The Pantheon has no metro stop nearby, which surprises everybody: you arrive on foot, from Largo di Torre Argentina or from Piazza Navona, or on the buses that run along Corso Rinascimento and Via del Corso. From Piazza Venezia it is a ten-minute walk.
The right moment. The Pantheon is the monument in Rome with the biggest difference between nine in the morning and midday. At opening there are twenty people inside; by eleven the square is full and people are talking loudly indoors. Go at opening, or in the last hour, and if you can, pick a rainy day.
If you want a voice in your ear, the official Pantheon audio guide exists and is very well made, read by Italian actors with original music: you can book the ticket with the official audio guide and check availability. What you are buying is the ticket already issued plus the commentary, not privileged access: as I said above, there is no skip-the-line at the Pantheon.
What to see a few steps away
The Pantheon sits in the densest part of Rome, and that is its greatest advantage.
Five minutes away is Piazza Navona, with the Fountain of the Four Rivers by Bernini, which is the perfect Baroque counterpart to the Pantheon: where the temple is geometry and silence, the fountain is movement and water. In the same direction, ten minutes away, is the Trevi Fountain, fed by the aqueduct that carries the name of the same Agrippa as the inscription out front. And ten minutes in the other direction is the Vittoriano, whose lesser-known side I wrote about in the article on the Altare della Patria: its dome, like every Western dome, descends from this one.
One last thing, worth the ticket on its own. Before you leave, stand exactly under the oculus and stay still for a minute, looking up. The Pantheon is designed so that the dome reads only from there, from the centre: it is the one point where the sphere the architect had in mind closes. From anywhere else you see a vault; from there you see a sphere.
