Pantheon

Begun as a church to Sainte-Genevieve and finished in 1790, the building was converted during the Revolution into a mausoleum for those the nation chose to honour, and the crypt now holds Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, Marie Curie, Josephine Baker and around eighty others; entry is by decision of the state, and the composition of the list has been argued about ever since. In 1851 Leon Foucault suspended a sixty-seven metre pendulum from the dome, and its slow rotation over hours demonstrated the earth's rotation directly for the first time in public. A copy hangs there now. The dome is climbed in season for a view down the Latin Quarter.

What you actually see

• The crypt - Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Curie and Baker among the tombs.
• Foucault's pendulum - a replica of the 1851 demonstration under the dome.
• The painted nave - nineteenth-century murals of Sainte-Genevieve and French history.
• The dome climb - a seasonal ascent to the colonnade for city views.

When to go

Year-round; the dome climb runs roughly April to October and closes in bad weather. The building is cold inside in winter. Mornings are quietest.

Honest expectations

The interior is vast, bare and cold, which some find austere. The dome climb is a separate ticket, seasonal, and involves many steps. The pendulum is a replica, not the original.

Nearby

The Luxembourg Gardens lie west; the Sorbonne is north.