Santa Maria degli Angeli: Michelangelo in the Baths of Diocletian
Why is it significant?
Look at the front of this church and you will see no facade at all: just a bare, curved wall of ancient brick, rough and scarred, with a modern door set into it.
Key Facts
| Place | Santa Maria degli Angeli: Michelangelo in the Baths of Diocletian |
|---|---|
| Address | Piazza della Repubblica, 00185 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.90340, 12.49730 |
| Part of Walk | Rivals on the Quirinal: Bernini vs Borromini in Baroque Rome |
| Generated | Generated |
Look at the front of this church and you will see no facade at all: just a bare, curved wall of ancient brick, rough and scarred, with a modern door set into it. That wall is part of the Baths of Diocletian, the biggest public baths ever built in Rome, finished around 306, where something like three thousand people could bathe at once.
For more than a thousand years after the aqueducts were cut, the baths stood empty and crumbling. Then, in 1561, Pope Pius the Fourth gave the task of turning them into a church to an old man of eighty-six. His name was Michelangelo. Instead of knocking the ruins down, he did almost nothing to them. He simply kept the vast vaulted central hall of the baths and declared it a church. He died three years later, before it was finished.
Go inside and you will feel it immediately. The space is colossal, the vaults soar, and eight gigantic columns of red granite rise from floor to ceiling, each one a single block of stone, standing where Roman engineers put them seventeen centuries ago. You are standing in a Roman bath hall that has never lost its roof.
Now look down. Running diagonally across the floor is a long strip of bronze set in marble, decorated with the signs of the zodiac. It is a meridian line, built in 1702 for Pope Clement the Eleventh by the astronomer Francesco Bianchini. At solar noon, a ray of sunlight falls through a small hole high in the wall and lands on the line, and its position tells you the date and the season. For a century and a half, Rome set its clocks by it.
There was also a point to make. The papacy had reformed the calendar a century earlier, and Bianchini's line was meant to prove the Gregorian calendar right, and to rival a famous meridian in Bologna. Science and faith, in a Roman bath, under Michelangelo's vaults. When you come out, cross the busy square in front of you to its far side, where the curving porticoes meet Via Nazionale.