Pantheon Entry Ticket for a Visit with No Guide and No Clock

This is admission and nothing else. No guide walks you round, no commentary plays in your ear, no group waits for you at the door. The ticket is reserved in advance, so the line for buying one is not your line. The building was finished around AD 125 and the plan is simple enough to read without help: a rectangular porch, a linking block, then the round cella under its dome. Sixteen granite columns hold the porch up, eight grey ones across the front quarried at Mons Claudianus in the Egyptian desert, eight rose ones behind them from Aswan. Each shaft is a single piece of stone 11.7 metres tall and weighing about fifty tonnes, brought down the Nile and across the Mediterranean because nobody could carve one nearer. Inside, the oculus is the only window. Nine metres of open sky, no glass, never any glass, and the light it drops moves round the room all day. Half an hour covers the visit at a normal walk. Nothing stops you staying longer, and without a schedule most people do.