Pantheon Ticket and Audio Guide, Meeting Outside the Hotel Minerva

The meeting point is easy to describe and easy to walk to. Face the Pantheon, take the street to its right, walk for a minute, and the Hotel Minerva appears. The meeting point is directly in front of it, at Via del Pozzo delle Cornacchie 56. What you go on to see began under Agrippa around 27 BCE and is not that building. The first Pantheon burned, and the one standing now was rebuilt under Hadrian and finished between 125 and 128. Excavations in the 1990s settled something about the original that had been repeated wrongly for a century: Agrippa's building faced north, the same way this one does, rather than the opposite direction that generations of reconstructions had given it. The dome is still the largest unreinforced dome in the world, with the oculus open at its centre. Dedicated to all the Roman gods to begin with, it is a church now, and among the best preserved buildings anywhere from the ancient world. The audio guide covers the rest at your own speed.