Castel Sant'Angelo and the Pantheon: Two Skip-the-Line Tickets

Two monuments, two tickets, and one thing worth checking before you book: Castel Sant'Angelo closes on Mondays, and the Pantheon does not. Castel Sant'Angelo is a drum of Roman concrete on the bank of the Tiber, built as a tomb and turned into a fortress. Seven floors hold ancient pieces and Renaissance work in good condition. The Chamber of the Ashes was a prison; the papal apartments above it are painted throughout. The terrace at the top gives the view over Rome, the river and the Ponte Sant'Angelo with its angels along the parapet, and it is the reason to climb the spiral ramp rather than stop halfway. The Pantheon is a short walk across the river. It was a temple to all the gods before it was a church, and the oculus at the crown of the dome is the only light it has. The tombs are set into the wall around the room. Both monuments were built by the same emperor, Hadrian, within a few years of each other, which is not a coincidence and is the reason the two make sense on one ticket. That Monday question deserves a second look, because nothing about this booking is refundable once it is made. Buy it for a Monday and you have paid fifty euros for one of the two monuments with nothing to be done about it. Check the day before you check anything else. The two entrances sit on opposite banks and there is nothing between them but the walk: about a kilometre over Ponte Sant'Angelo, fifteen to twenty minutes at the pace the streets allow. Neither ticket carries a guide or a commentary, so the day is self-directed. The multimedia film on ancient Rome that comes with it is a screening in one place, not something you take round with you. The bridge is part of the story rather than the way to it. Hadrian built that too, the Pons Aelius, to carry mourners to his own tomb, and the angels along the parapet are Bernini's design. Two of them are copies: the pair he carved himself were moved indoors to Sant'Andrea delle Fratte and never came back. The tomb was finished the year after Hadrian died, by the emperor who succeeded him, and held imperial ashes for under a century before the city's defences absorbed it and made it Rome's strongest point. The bronze angel on the summit is eighteenth-century and marks the legend the building takes its name from, an archangel seen sheathing his sword above it as a plague ended. The walled corridor leaving towards the Vatican is the Passetto, and it earned its keep in 1527, when a pope used it to get out of a city being sacked. At the Pantheon, the entry that comes with this ticket is a reserved arrival time rather than a shorter queue, and it is issued in a name. Keep to hand whatever document you booked it under.