The Baths of Caracalla

The story

A city within the city

If you walk into the Baths of Caracalla in Rome today, you see towering brick walls, enormous arches and roofless halls. But try to imagine this place as it was in AD 216: marble floors and mosaics, statues everywhere, running water, voices, laughter, the scent of oils. The baths were much more than a bath: they were a place to be together, to play sport, to rest, to talk with friends.

They were inaugurated in 216 by the emperor Caracalla, who had come to the throne in 211. According to the brick stamps, that is, the marks pressed into the bricks that make it possible to date the building, the work took place between 212 and 216. When the emperor inaugurated them they were not yet finished: his successors Elagabalus and Severus Alexander worked on the great outer enclosure and the decoration. An old hypothesis, criticised today, held that the work had begun as early as 206, under his father Septimius Severus.

How big they were

The measurements make your head spin. The whole complex, with the enclosure, measures 337 by 328 metres, and reaches about 406 metres if you count the large exedrae, that is, the semicircular spaces. It covers about 13 hectares, like more than eighteen football pitches. The central block, that is, the main building, measures about 114 by 220 metres. How many people could get in is hard to say: scholars' estimates are very different, from a few thousand a day up to eight thousand.

The bathing route

The Romans followed a route. After exercises in the palaestra, of which there were two, symmetrical, with a central courtyard of 50 by 20 metres, you passed into the heated rooms. The tepidarium was the lukewarm room, with two pools at the sides. Then came the caldarium, the hot room, circular in shape, with a diameter of 34 metres and a dome resting on eight piers, with large windows to catch the sun. Perhaps there was also a laconicum, a sort of sauna. Finally the frigidarium: the cold-water hall, 58 by 24 metres, covered by three cross vaults supported by eight piers, with pools for cold water. And then the natatio, a large open-air swimming pool, decorated with four monolithic granite columns.

Besides the baths there were two halls with an apse, that is, with a semicircular wall, which were probably libraries, one for books in Latin and one for those in Greek. Only the one on the right survives. The baths also had gardens and spaces for walking.

Water and the underground

A place like this needed water in quantity. In 212 a branch of the Aqua Marcia was built, called the Aqua Antoniniana, which passed over the Appian Way resting on a monumental arch, the Arch of Drusus. The water was collected in a great cistern, supported by 64 chambers on two floors, in the south-west enclosure.

Under the halls there was a network of rooms and galleries for the service of the baths, which visitors did not see. They were excavated in 1901 and 1912. In the 20th century, in the excavations of the underground levels, the remains of a mithraeum were also discovered, a place dedicated to the cult of Mithras, an eastern god: it is the largest known in Rome.

Between art and ruin

The baths were full of works of art. The excavations of the 16th century, ordered by Pope Paul III, brought to light very famous statues, such as the Farnese Bull, the Farnese Hercules and the Flora, today in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. In 1824 a mosaic with 28 figures of athletes was found, now in the Vatican Museums.

The baths stopped working around 537, during the war between the Goths and the Byzantines, when the Gothic king Vitiges cut the aqueducts that brought water to Rome. Without water, the baths could no longer be used. After they were abandoned, the complex was reused in various ways, even as a hospice for pilgrims, as a cemetery and as a vineyard, and the ruins were used as a quarry for marble and other materials: pieces of the baths ended up in Pisa cathedral and in Santa Maria in Trastevere.

Today

Since 1937 the central part has hosted concerts and shows, in particular the summer season of the Rome Opera, with an auditorium that has had 3,500 seats since 2003. In 1960, during the Rome Olympics, the gymnastics events were held there. In 2024 water began to flow again in a new pool of water at the entrance.