Baths of Diocletian (Museo Nazionale Romano) site features

The Baths of Diocletian are a Roman ruin you meet at street level in a working part of modern Rome, a few steps from Termini station, and the first impression is of enormous walls of warm red-brown brick standing where you expect a city block: curved exedrae, huge blind arches and half-vaults, with grass and small shrubs growing out of the brickwork high up, and post-war office buildings rising directly behind them.

Scale is the whole impression. The complex covered 13 hectares — the ancient area ran between what are now via Torino, via Volturno, piazza dei Cinquecento and via XX Settembre, which is to say four modern streets — and held up to 3,000 people. A single surviving wall is several storeys high and tens of metres long, and it is only a fragment.

The shapes are geometric and repetitive. Roman bath design used the same vocabulary over and over: the main halls on a central axis, two circular halls flanking the great exedra, two rectangular rooms between them, a great exedra that may have worked as a theatre, and two further exedrae at the eastern corner of the enclosure. Standing among them you are reading a plan at full size.

Inside the museum the register changes completely. The garden towards piazza dei Cinquecento is laid out with upright funerary stones — stelae, mostly from the late republic and the early empire, and altars from the first two centuries of the empire — set among planting, with sarcophagi and funerary statues along the access avenue. The works then continue in four ambulatories around the cloister.

What you will not see is a pool. The bathing rooms themselves are elsewhere now: the axis of calidarium, tepidarium and frigidarium is the interior of the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a church, and one of the circular halls is the church of San Bernardo alle Terme.

The bathing axis, now a basilica

Calidarium, tepidarium and frigidarium along a central axis, recognisable today in the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli.

The octagonal hall

At the western corner, at the junction with via Parigi; it now houses the Museo dell'Arte Salvata.

The two circular halls

Flanking the great exedra. The one on the west side has been transformed into the church of San Bernardo alle Terme.

The great exedra

Perhaps having the function of a theatre, with two rectangular rooms, probably libraries, between it and the circular halls.

The eastern exedrae

Two exedrae of the eastern corner of the enclosure survive, where conferences and public readings took place.

The garden on piazza dei Cinquecento

The entrance to the Museum since its origins, holding epigraphic material, mostly funerary, and varied architectural material, with sarcophagi and funerary statues along the access avenue.

The funerary stelae and altars

The stelae date mostly to the end of the republican age and the early empire; the altars are referable to the first two centuries of the empire.

The epigraphic section

It illustrates the birth and the spread of Latin writing, through a very rich collection drawn from the Museum's own holdings.

The four ambulatories

Their display was redefined by the institution of the Museum in 1889.