Baths of Caracalla

Interesting facts

The baths could hold about 1,600 bathers at once and served an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people a day, free of charge.

Builders moved over 2,000 tonnes of material every day for six years, with around 9,500 men working on the substructure alone.

At least 252 columns stood in the complex; the eight giant columns of the frigidarium weighed close to 100 tonnes each.

The furnaces beneath the baths burned around 10 tonnes of wood every day, drawn from stores holding more than 2,000 tonnes.

More than 120 statues once decorated the halls and courts, many of them now in museums in Naples.

The frigidarium measured about 58 by 24 metres and rose to nearly 33 metres, while the caldarium dome spanned about 35 metres.

The Mithraeum beneath the baths, about 23 metres long and 10 metres wide, is the largest known meeting place of the cult of Mithras.

The gymnastics events of the 1960 Rome Olympics were held among the ruins.

The roads around the baths served as the circuit of the Rome Grand Prix motor race four times between 1947 and 1951.

Why it is worth it

Few ruins in Rome convey the scale of imperial ambition as bluntly as the Baths of Caracalla. Begun under Septimius Severus and inaugurated by his son Caracalla in AD 216, the complex occupied a walled rectangle of roughly 337 by 328 metres on the southern edge of the city, on land that had once been a garden estate. Its builders levelled parts of the surrounding hills, laid several million bricks and raised the whole bathing block on a platform six metres high, leaving room underneath for furnaces, fuel stores and service tunnels. A dedicated branch aqueduct, the Aqua Antoniniana, filled eighteen cisterns on the south side. Late antique writers counted the baths among the wonders of Rome, and they were the city's second-largest after the later Baths of Diocletian.

The plan follows a strict axis. Bathers moved between a vast frigidarium under three groin vaults, a tepidarium, and a circular caldarium whose dome, close to the Pantheon's in span, rested on just eight piers; a 50-metre open-air natatio lay at the far end, flanked by two exercise courts. Around the main block were gardens, shops and two libraries, one of which survives with the niches that once held its scrolls. Below ground, archaeologists in 1912 found the largest known Mithraeum, a vaulted hall with a black-and-white mosaic floor and a fresco of the god. The frigidarium's design had a long afterlife: its vaults were copied directly for the great halls of the original Pennsylvania Station in New York and Chicago Union Station.

The baths worked until the Ostrogoths cut Rome's aqueducts during the siege of 537, then became a quarry. Popes and cardinals stripped out marble and columns; the excavations of Paul III in the 1540s yielded the Farnese Bull and Farnese Hercules, now in Naples, and two granite tubs that still serve as fountains in Piazza Farnese. What remains is brick stripped to its core, but the height of the walls gives the scale away. From 1937 to 1993 the Rome Opera used the caldarium as its summer stage, and the site gained global fame as the backdrop to the first Three Tenors concert in 1990; performances now use a separate movable stage outside the ruins.

Getting there

The baths lie on the southern side of historic Rome, about 2 km from the city centre. The closest airport is Ciampino (CIA), about 12 km away.

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia

The Baths of Caracalla in Rome, Italy, were the city's second largest Roman public bath complex, or thermae, after the Baths of Diocletian. The baths were likely built between AD 212 and 216/217, during the reigns of emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla. They were in operation until the 530s and then fell into disuse and ruin.

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Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia