Ahead rises a domed basilica whose architect also designed the US Capitol, the first Catholic cathedral built in the United States. The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption was designed by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, the architect whom Jefferson appointed to complete and expand the Capitol building, and construction began in 1806. Latrobe designed a remarkably modern building for its era — a domed basilica plan that drew on the Pantheon in Rome and the contemporaneous work of European neoclassicists, but adapted to the optimistic spirit of the new American republic.
The dome, 48 feet in diameter and rising 89 feet from the floor, fills the interior with light through sixteen large windows. The cathedral represents the central importance of Baltimore to American Catholicism: it was the seat of the first American Catholic diocese, established in 1789, and the first Archbishop of Baltimore, John Carroll — a member of the same Carroll family whose mansion you may have visited at Mount Clare — was a cousin of Charles Carroll, signer of the Declaration. At the time the cathedral was built, Catholics were a small and sometimes persecuted minority in America.
The Baltimore Cathedral was a declaration that they intended to be permanent. Pope John Paul II visited in 1995. The interior, restored to Latrobe's original color scheme in a major renovation completed in 2006, is among the finest spaces in American architecture.