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.
Begin at the head of Piazza della Rotonda, where cafe tables ring the square and a fountain crowned by an obelisk marks the centre. Note how the temple sits below the modern street: the city has been rising on twenty centuries of accumulated rubble since Hadrian's day. Once inside, you will raise your eyes to the very dome that has awed every generation since antiquity, and the wider centro storico unfolds from this square.
Pause on the porch before entering. Sixteen columns of red-and-grey granite rise 40 feet, each cut from a single block and so stout that four adults stretching out their arms can barely join hands around one. Every shaft weighs about 55 tons, was quarried in Egypt, ferried across the Mediterranean, hauled up the Tiber by barge, dragged overland and finally winched upright with ropes and pulleys. Each column is crowned by a Corinthian capital carved with leaves, the Greek order the Romans prized above all. In Roman days the ceiling gleamed with bronze plating until a Barberini pope stripped it in the 1600s, prompting the acid joke that the Barberini had finished what the barbarians had left alone; that metal helped cast the canopy above the high altar of St Peter's. The great doors, 23 feet of bronze, are generally accepted as original, and in antiquity statues of Augustus and his son-in-law Agrippa stood on either side.
Once inside, the eye shoots straight up to the dome, the largest ever raised until the Renaissance. Concrete was the Roman invention that made it possible: at the base the walls measure a full 23 feet in thickness, heavy with travertine, while up at the crown they thin to under five feet and are lightened with pumice, a volcanic rock. The square coffers recessed in the ceiling shave weight without sacrificing strength, and blind brick arches buried in the walls, which you can glimpse where the brickwork is left bare in the niches, stiffen the drum. The floor is about 1,800 years old, with roughly four-fifths of its original paving still in place; it tilts gently toward the edges so rainwater can run off, and its design of circles and squares set alternately survives unchanged. In pagan times a statue of Jupiter stood exactly where the main altar is now, while the other niches, today filled with Christian images, once held the heavenly deities of sun, moon and planets. The Romans kept gods for every trade, from bread-baking to fruit trees to manure, and being endlessly superstitious they came here to keep the fickle immortals on their side. This was one of the few temples where ordinary people, not just priests, were allowed to worship.
The dome's height and width are equal, 142 feet each way: imagine a basketball sitting inside a wastebasket, just kissing the bottom as it fits. At the crown sits the oculus, the building's single source of light, a hole nearly 30 feet across that is completely open to the sky. To pagan worshippers the dome represented the heavenly vault, the home of the gods, and the open eye above offered a direct, faintly frightening glimpse of their realm. The dome's reputation spread far: Brunelleschi studied it before raising the cathedral dome of Florence that opened the Renaissance, Michelangelo had it in mind for St Peter's, and the United States Capitol in Washington is a distant heir. On a sunny day the shaft of light falling through the oculus spans the full 142 feet to the floor, the finest Roman column of all.
On the left as you face the altar, around the ten o'clock position, a lit glass niche holds the stone coffin of Raphael, who died in 1520 at 37. Above it stands the statue of the Madonna with Child that he himself commissioned, and along the tomb runs a Latin epitaph that mourns how Nature, while he lived, feared being outdone by him, and when he died, feared she would die as well. A bronze portrait of the painter, his hair flowing, hangs overhead on the wall. The master joined Leonardo's serene calm to Michelangelo's dramatic force, and in Rome he decorated the Vatican Palace while Michelangelo, a few corridors away, was painting the Sistine ceiling. Charming and easygoing, he moved among popes, kings, merchants and society women with equal ease, the model Renaissance man. His will asked for burial in the Pantheon, the place he had come to for inspiration, and the city was glad to honour the artist who had beautified it with frescoes, paintings and tapestries, many now in the Vatican Museums and the Villa Farnesina.
Across the rotunda, the tombs of the first two kings of modern Italy face one another; both were Savoys. A bronze eagle and the words Padre della Patria, meaning father of the nation, mark King Victor Emmanuel II, who led the peninsula to unification in 1861. Before his reign Italy was a patchwork of foreign-ruled states, and Victor Emmanuel, sovereign of Piedmont and the only Italian-born ruler of the era, was the natural figurehead the nationalists could rally around; they swept out the foreign dynasties and made him the symbolic head of a parliamentary democracy. Rome's giant white monument at Piazza Venezia honours him, and the bronze of his tomb was melted down from papal cannons, a sign of the era's poor relations between church and state. Across the way rests his son Umberto I, whose porphyry monument, purple the colour of royalty, is topped by a crown resting on a stone pillow. Beneath lies his queen and cousin Margherita, famous for her pearls and her fashion, and best remembered because the pizza margherita took its name from her in 1889: mozzarella, tomato and basil, the colours of Italy's flag. Both were staunch conservatives, and in 1900 Umberto was shot dead. Italian royalists still lay flowers at these tombs, where a white-gloved guard sometimes keeps a guestbook; the Savoys fell from favour after their dealings with Mussolini, and in 1943 the king fled Rome as the Germans arrived, abandoning his people. The monarchy was abolished after the war, and no male Savoy was allowed back on Italian soil until 2003.
Piazza della Rotonda, the square that fronts the temple, has drawn people together for two thousand years. Its slope is a lesson in the rise of Rome: walk down it and you walk through the centuries of rubbish and silt on which the modern city stands. In past ages, fish and poultry stalls crowded the temple portico itself, and in the 1700s an urban beautification scheme added the fountain and the obelisk that now anchor the square. Its easy-going piazza life is a Roman tradition, and Piazza Navona lies a couple of minutes away.
A fresh drinking fountain bubbles beside the obelisk for thirsty visitors. For a caffeine fix, a pair of Rome's most storied coffee bars sit just around the corner: Tazza d'Oro at Via degli Orfani 84, where the granita di caffè con panna, an icy coffee slush with cream, is bliss on a hot afternoon, and Bar Sant'Eustachio at Piazza di Sant'Eustachio 82.
The name Pantheon joins pan, all, with theos, god: a temple to every deity. Marcus Agrippa, son-in-law of Augustus, raised the first building here in 27 BCE, and the pediment still carries his proud inscription claiming the work for himself, though the structure that stands today is Hadrian's. Fire destroyed the first temple in 80 CE, lightning wrecked its successor in 110, and around 120 CE the emperor Hadrian, a restless traveller and amateur architect who had studied great buildings across his empire, rebuilt the whole thing, keeping Agrippa's inscription as a compliment.
The building's survival is a fluke of faith. As the empire crumbled, barbarian looters stripped some of the marble from the exterior, but the shell stood firm. In 609 the Pantheon was consecrated as a Christian church, honouring every martyr instead of every god, with the Virgin Mary taking Jupiter's place above the main altar. The conversion saved it from being quarried for building stone and kept it maintained across the medieval centuries; no other ancient Roman structure has been in uninterrupted use from its own day to ours. A Byzantine emperor of the 600s carried off the golden ceiling that once lined the dome's interior, and the two grilled windows flanking the altar, modern copies, hint at how colourful the ancient decor was.