Pantheon Skip-the-Line Ticket with Audio Guide to the Tombs

Entry is booked ahead, so the queue at the ticket window is not part of the visit, and the audio guide takes over once you are inside. Its subject is what the Pantheon became. Built as a temple and consecrated as a church, it is the one building of imperial Rome that never fell out of use, and the burials inside are the record of that continuity. Raphael is here, in a tomb he bought and an aedicule he restored at his own expense, neither of them a gift. Three centuries later the new Italian state chose the same room for its kings: Victor Emmanuel II, then Umberto I. Their monuments face each other across the rotunda. Above all of it is the dome, unreinforced concrete spanning 43 metres, and the oculus at its crown, open to the sky in every weather. The marble underfoot has been walked on continuously for nineteen centuries. The commentary runs at your pace, so a second circuit of the room costs nothing but time.