The one monument of ancient Rome that still works exactly as the Romans built it: a 2,000-year-old temple, now a church, whose dome has never been matched.
Last updated August 23, 2026
In a nutshell: the Pantheon is ancient Rome's best-preserved building and one of the great engineering feats of all time - a concrete dome 43.4m across with an oculus open to the sky, and inside the tombs of Raphael and the kings of Italy. It stands on the lively, cafe-ringed Piazza della Rotonda, a step from Piazza Navona, Campo de' Fiori and the churches and museums of the district. Start from the district overview to get your bearings.
Awe-inspiring 2,000-year-old temple turned church, the Pantheon is Rome's most intact ancient building and a giant of architectural history. Its weathered grey shell looks its age, yet stepping through the huge bronze doors and craning your neck at the biggest dome of unreinforced concrete ever raised is an experience like no other.
Tip: Get there at opening time to dodge the heaviest crush, then come back at night, when the floodlit facade glows against the darkening sky.
The structure visitors see today went up around 125 CE, but the site's story starts far earlier. Marcus Agrippa raised the first temple in 27 BCE under an urban renewal programme launched by Augustus; fire consumed that building in 80 CE. Domitian ordered a rebuild, only for lightning to raze it again in 110 CE. Hadrian then had the temple reconstructed in 125 CE, the incarnation that survives. The classical gods are thought to have been the original dedicatees, which explains the name Pantheon, from the Greek for 'all' (pan) and 'god' (theos), although its precise religious role remains a puzzle. Dedicated to Christian worship in 608, it took the title it still officially carries, Basilica di Santa Maria ad Martyres. Renaissance builders revered it: Brunelleschi borrowed from it for Florence's cupola, while Michelangelo studied it ahead of shaping St Peter's dome. It also became a distinguished burial ground, the last resting place of Raphael, Annibale Carracci and Baldassare Peruzzi, plus Kings Vittorio Emanuele II and Umberto I.
In antiquity the temple stood on a raised platform looking out over a rectangular, porticoed square; nowadays its dark-grey facade fronts the lively, cafe-ringed Piazza della Rotonda. The grand entrance portico presents 16 Corinthian columns, each 11.8m tall and carved from one solid column of Egyptian granite, holding up the triangular pediment. Behind them, a pair of 20-tonne bronze doors opens onto the rotunda, and whether they are originals or 16th-century copies is still hotly debated. One point on which historians agree: when the granite columns came over from eastern Egypt, hauled across the land and along rivers and seas aboard wooden sledges and barges, they proved too short. The engineers simply revised their plans and pushed on. Scant traces of the original decoration survive, though rivets and pockmarks in the brickwork reveal where panels of marble veneer once sat. Bronze once abounded too, but the centuries stripped much of it away. Most infamously, the Barberini Pope Urban VIII had the portico's bronze beams smelted down in the 17th century to cast 80 cannons for Castel Sant'Angelo and to give Bernini bronze for the baldachin he built at St Peter's. The episode spawned a saying still quoted today: 'What the barbarians didn't do, the Barberini did for them.'
The full, breath-taking scale of the Pantheon only registers once you are inside. Sunlight pours through the oculus, an 8.7m-wide opening punched through the dome's centre, and the cylindrical, marble-lined space feels immense; the effect was calculated, meant to humble worshippers before the gods. The high altar stands opposite the entrance beneath a 7th-century icon, the Madonna col Bambino (Madonna and Child). Raphael's tomb lies to your left as you face the altar, signed by Lorenzetto's 1520 sculpture of the Madonna del Sasso (Madonna of the Rock). The tombs of King Umberto I and Margherita of Savoy, the queen who gave pizza margherita its name, sit alongside. Across the rotunda lies the tomb of King Vittorio Emanuele II, Umberto's father, who reigned as united Italy's first king. Before you go, check the floor and the ceiling alike: the fine polychrome marble underfoot and across most of the walls is original.
Crowning the whole building, the dome ranks as the Romans' supreme architectural feat. Until the 15th century no cupola anywhere matched it, and no larger unreinforced concrete dome has been built since. Its pleasing proportions rest on a precise symmetry: the diameter equals the building's interior height of 43.4m. The oculus, which symbolically joined the temple to the gods, also does vital structural work, soaking up and redistributing the dome's enormous tensile forces. Of course, it also lets the rain in, yet an updraft inside breaks the raindrops into a fine spray barely visible to the eye. This 'chimney effect' turns the rain into a mist which evaporates quickly on contact with the gently convex floor, which hides 22 nearly invisible drainage holes. Around the oculus radiate five rings of 28 coffers, indented panels that were once decorated but, above all, lighten the cupola's enormous weight.
For generations the Latin inscription above the entrance convinced historians that the temple on view was Marcus Agrippa's original work. The words do suggest as much: 'M.AGRIPPA.L.F.COS.TERTIUM.FECIT', that is, 'built this, Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, during his third consulate'. But 19th-century digs exposed traces of an older temple, and scholars concluded that Hadrian had simply kept Agrippa's inscription above his own new building.
Pentecost, celebrated on the Sunday that falls seven weeks after Easter, sends countless red petals showering through the oculus after the 10.30am Mass. The rite, which has run for centuries, symbolises the Holy Spirit's descent to earth. For news of Masses and events, visit pantheonroma.org/liturgical-life.