Pantheon Audio Guide in Eight Languages, 15 Stops in 35 Minutes

The building's other name is the one it took as a church: Basilica di Santa Maria ad Martyres. This ticket covers the visit with an audio guide in your own language. Eight are available: English, Italian, French, Spanish, Chinese, German, Portuguese and Russian. The commentary is built around fifteen listening points and runs about thirty-five minutes, which is roughly what the room takes at a walking pace with pauses. An entry reservation is included, and at weekends that reservation is compulsory rather than convenient. Show it at the desk inside the Pantheon. Fifteen stops in one circular room means the guide is dense rather than long. It has to be: everything worth saying about the Pantheon sits in a space forty-three metres across, and the parts that matter, the dome, the oculus, the coffers, the tombs and the floor, are all visible from the same standing position. Because the fifteen points sit in one room, you turn rather than walk between them, and the thirty-five minutes belongs to you. Pause the commentary, stand under the opening until the disc of light has moved down a wall, start it again. There is no group at the far end of a corridor to catch up with. That half hour has a lot to carry. The dome is still the largest span of unreinforced concrete ever built, and its diameter matches the height from the floor to the oculus, so the interior would hold a sphere exactly. The coffers climb in five rings of twenty-eight, each ring smaller than the one below, which lightens the load and steepens the perspective at the same time. The floor under the opening is laid to a slight fall, with drain holes cut into it, because rain has come through the roof for nineteen centuries and still does. Raphael has lain in one of the niches since 1520, and two kings of unified Italy lie in others. The inscription across the porch names Marcus Agrippa, who put the first Pantheon here in the twenties BC. That building burnt. What stands is Hadrian's, finished around AD 125, and he left his predecessor's name on the front instead of his own, which is why the date of the place was argued over for centuries. The dress code at the door is enforced and people are turned away for it: no shorts, no sleeveless tops, knees and shoulders covered, men and women alike. It is a working church, and when a service is on the building closes to visitors until it ends. One reservation covers up to fifteen people, and the ticket works on a phone or on paper. The floor is level from the door onwards, so a pram goes through without difficulty and nothing on the route asks anything of your legs. The nearest buses stop at Largo di Torre Argentina, a few minutes to the south. Sales on this ticket are final.