Panthéon Centre

The Panthéon in the Latin Quarter wears a massive stone dome modeled after Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, looming over the neighborhood like a mountain of neoclassical granite. King Louis the Fifteenth ordered its construction in seventeen fifty-five to honor Saint Genevieve after he recovered from a severe illness. The architect, Jacques-Germain Soufflot, died before the structure was completed, and the French Revolution arrived just in time to convert the intended church into a mausoleum for the nation’s heroes.