Baths of Caracalla: A Palace for the People
Why is it significant?
Stand on the grass and let your eyes climb the brick walls in front of you, broken ridges more than thirty metres high, with sky showing through where great vaults once closed overhead. In summer, swifts scream around the ruins.
Key Facts
| Place | Baths of Caracalla: A Palace for the People |
|---|---|
| Address | Viale delle Terme di Caracalla 52, 00153 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.87880, 12.49250 |
| Part of Walk | Queen of Roads: Rome's Appian Way from the Baths of Caracalla to the Catacombs |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the grass and let your eyes climb the brick walls in front of you, broken ridges more than thirty metres high, with sky showing through where great vaults once closed overhead. In summer, swifts scream around the ruins. Nobody has bathed here for almost fifteen hundred years, and yet the place still feels as if it is waiting for the doors to open.
These are the Baths of Caracalla, opened around 216 AD. Picture marble on every wall, mosaics of athletes underfoot, a cold pool open to the sky, warm rooms, and a round hot hall crowned by a dome some thirty-five metres across. Perhaps sixteen hundred bathers at a time came for a tiny fee or for nothing at all. It was a gym, a spa, a library and a park in one: a palace an emperor gave to ordinary Romans.
And the emperor? Caracalla was not a nice man. In 211 he had his own brother Geta murdered, the story goes in the arms of their mother, and then ordered Geta's name and face chiselled off monuments across the empire. A year later he granted Roman citizenship to almost every free man in the empire... cynics, then and now, point out that new citizens also paid new taxes. Bread, baths and blood: that was his politics.
The real marvel is underground. Beneath your feet runs a network of service tunnels wide enough for carts, where slaves stoked the furnaces day and night and an aqueduct branch delivered the water. Down there, archaeologists also found the largest shrine of Mithras in Rome, a cave-like temple to the bull-slaying god. The baths worked until 537, when the Goths besieging the city cut the aqueducts. In the sixteenth century the Farnese family dug colossal statues out of the rubble, among them the Farnese Hercules, now in Naples.
Since 1937 the ruins have enjoyed a second life as an open-air opera stage on summer nights, and in 1990 the Three Tenors sang here to the whole world. Now walk east along the avenue under the umbrella pines to the small church facing the baths, where the first Christian legend of this road is waiting.