Rome in October: The Month the Clocks Change and the Queues Do Not

Everything below comes from three places. The weather is the official Italian climate normals for 1991 to 2020, submitted for the station at Roma Ciampino, which is the only series for this city with a declared method and a declared period. The daylight is our own calculation for the co-ordinates of Piazza della Rotonda. The prices and hours are the Ministry of Culture's, read on 2 September this year. Where a figure does not exist, we have said so rather than borrowing one from somewhere adjacent.

October in Rome averages 22.2 °C by day and 12.4 °C at night. That is shirt-sleeve weather at two in the afternoon and a jacket by seven. It is also the month the rain arrives: 91.8 mm across 7.7 days with measurable rain, against 67.6 mm in September. November is worse again at 112.8 mm, the wettest month of the Roman year on this series.

So the useful way to hold October is not wet or dry. It rains on roughly one day in four, and it rains hard when it does, because the totals climb faster than the rain days do. September and October are a day and a half apart in frequency and 24 mm apart in volume. Nothing about that is a drizzle.

Two honest caveats about that table, both of which matter more than they look.

The first is the empty cell. September's sunshine figure is blank because it is blank in the official submission, and the same is true of the summer rainfall for this station. We have left the gaps as gaps. Filling them from a coastal station, or from an older thirty-year period, would produce a table that looks complete and quietly mixes two different things.

The second is the station itself. Ciampino sits south-east of the city, outside it. Italy's environmental agency measures the urban station at Roma Macao at 17.8 °C mean annual temperature against Ciampino's 16.0, and 787 mm of annual rainfall against 623. The Pantheon stands in the warmer, wetter of the two. Read the table as the floor for temperature and the floor for rain, not the ceiling.

Summer time across the European Union ends on the last Sunday in October, which this year is the 25th. The clocks go back an hour at three in the morning, local time. There has been talk of abolishing the practice since 2018 and no decision has followed, so it happens on schedule.

Here is what it does to a visit. The monument is open 9:00 to 19:00, with the ticket office closing at 18:00 and the last admission at 18:30. Those hours do not move with the season. The sky does.

Read the last column rather than the first. For most of October the final entry of the day still has light in it: on the 15th, 18:30 arrives 27 minutes before the sky finishes darkening. On the 24th the margin is down to about a quarter of an hour. On the 25th it inverts, and the last slot of the day sits three quarters of an hour into the night, where it stays until spring. The published opening hours and closures are the same in December as in July, which is the source of the confusion rather than the solution to it.

There is no artificial lighting inside. A late ticket in the last week of October buys you the shape of the room, the scale of it, and a circle of dark sky 43 metres up. That is not nothing, and some people prefer it. It is simply not what the photograph on the booking page shows, and the booking page does not distinguish between the two.

The most common question about rain here has an answer the square will not give you: yes, it comes through the oculus and lands on the floor. The basilica that runs the liturgy inside it says so on its own website, and calls the opposite the most famous false legend about the place. There are drains under the marble to take it away, and they are ancient. We keep the longer list of things about the Pantheon that are not true on a page of its own.

What follows from that is practical rather than romantic. On a wet October afternoon the interior is not shelter, and neither is the square. Piazza della Rotonda has no arcade, no awnings and exactly one roof, which is the portico you are queueing under.

Which queue you join matters more in the rain than in the sun. There are three at that door and they do not move at the same speed. The cash desk on the left clears in five to fifteen minutes even in high season; the card machines on the other side are the long one. We have written up all three queues separately, and in October the choice is the difference between a damp wait and a soaked one.

No, and it is not close. Two separate curves exist for this, and neither puts October in the quiet half of the year.

On arrivals to the city, with 100 as the monthly average, October sits at 117. Only May, June and July are higher, and the margin over them is a rounding error. On the visitor curve for the museums of Lazio, October is 105. The foreign share of arrivals in October is 78%, the third highest of the year, which is the figure that decides what the room sounds like.

The two curves disagree elsewhere, and the disagreement is worth knowing if you are choosing between months. Lazio's museums peak in April at 137 and dip in July to 99; arrivals do close to the opposite. The gap is Italian schoolchildren, who fill museum slots in spring and are on holiday in July. Anyone reading in English should follow the arrivals curve, and remember that in April they are competing with school groups for the same timed bands.

Capacity is what turns an index into a queue. Entry runs in nine timed bands from 9:00 to 18:00, capped at 1,200 people to a band, a ceiling the Ministry publishes. The middle of the day fills first, in every month of the year.

The first Sunday of every month is free at the Pantheon, and in October that is the 4th. Two things about it are regularly got wrong by the people selling tickets around it.

The first is that it cannot be booked online. There is no timed band to reserve and no ticket to hold, so everybody joins one queue, and any product advertising guaranteed entry at a set hour on that date is selling something that does not exist that day. The second is the arithmetic: a free Sunday in a month running at 117 on the arrivals index is the fullest the building gets. If the point of the visit is the room rather than the €7 ticket, one of the other thirty days in October is a better purchase.

Two more ways in without paying, both of them year-round rather than October specials. Entry during Mass is free, for worship: 17:00 on Saturdays and the eves of feast days, 10:30 on Sundays and feast days. And residents of the comune of Rome go in free, under a measure with no end date but a review due around April 2029.

One thing that is not a way in: the Roma Pass and the Omnia card. The Ministry states plainly that the Pantheon belongs to neither circuit. Nobody selling you one mentions it.