Italy: Culture Ministry introduces entry fee for 2,000-year-old Pantheon

Rime: The Italian Culture Ministry has introduced a 5-euro entrance ticket to enter one of Rome’s most famous tourist attractions, the 2,000-year-old Pantheon.

The new ticketing system was announced in March by culture minister Gennaro Sangiuliano, who said that charging a modest fee to help preserve the immensely popular monument where the painter Raphael is buried was “an objective based on common sense.”

Sense, however, may be missing from the rules of the system. Tourists have reported confounding instructions on how and where to buy a ticket, and long lines in the sweltering summer sun outside the Pantheon. According to the New York Times, some visitors purchased an audio tour for €10 on an official Pantheon website, only to learn later that the booking did not include the new entrance fee, which is available from a different Culture Ministry site or at the actual monument. Additionally, some foreign credit cards have been declines on the online booking platform.

Additionally, the new ticketing system risks the same issue plaguing visitors to another popular landmark, the Colosseum: the rise of a ticket black market, where scalpers buy cheap tickets in bulk then resell them at exorbitant prices—and make them available only as part of a packaged tour. Alfonsina Russo, the director of the Archaeological Park of the Colosseum, told the Times that last year she filed a complaint about the ticketing scheme with Italian police.

The Culture Ministry said that the Pantheon’s new ticketing platform will be extended in the coming months to other state landmarks and museum. Meanwhile, the minister said in a statement that the government and monument authorities were working to ensure entrance tickets remain accessible and fairly priced.