The Baths of Diocletian

Rome's Museo Nazionale Romano branch in the ancient Baths of Diocletian

The Terme di Diocleziano (Baths of Diocletian), built at the turn of the 4th century, have been put to various other uses over the centuries, and today you can visit three main parts.

The museum

The baths complex was formerly the sole seat of the National Roman Museum of antiquities, closed for more than a decade until the late 1990s saw the collections split up, with the best pieces going to new branches at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme (nearby) and the Palazzo Altemps (near Piazza Navona).

What remains of the Museo Nazionale Romano in the baths complex itself, reopened in summer 2000, consists of three sections, mostly installed in modernized rooms of a 16th-century charterhouse that occupy large chunk of the baths complex. (The Great Halls of the baths are open to the public only when filled with temporary exhibits.)

There's an extensive epigraphy section whose inscriptions aren’t particularly interesting (even if they are exhaustively explained on English placards), although the early Republican terra-cotta statuary is nice.

Also intriguing: a few rare shards of marble and pottery decorated with words or drawings referring to early Christianity.

Perhaps the most interesting bit focuses on what Rome was like before there were any Romans—which is to say, before the Latin tribe that lived on and around the Palatine Hill grew, expanded their hegemony, and spread out to conquer, well, pretty much everything.

There is the large exhibit on pre-Latin peoples from the area has informative placards to go along with the usual glass cases filled with Bronze and Iron Age pots and tomb paraphernalia, like the 5th century BC arms and armor pictured to the right.

The huge 79m- (264–ft.-) to-a-side Michelangelesque Cloister, supposedly based on a drawing by Michelangelo himself, is lined by headless statues and beat-up sarcophagi.

The church

To catch a glimpse of the ancient structure of the Baths of Diocletian unencumbered by the charterhouse, duck into the exhibit in the sacristy of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a section of the baths converted into a church by Michelangelo. » more

The hall

For the best quick sense of the baths as they were, drop by the nearby Aula Ottagona, a huge and airy brick room unadorned save for a funky modern inner webbing (left from its 1928 gig as a planetarium) and—as yet another branch of the Museo Nazionale Romano (yet with a separate entrance)—several excellent oversized ancient statues that came from this and other baths complexes around the city. » more

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