Baths of Caracalla

Historic · Rione San Saba / AppioRome,Italy

Rome's most complete imperial baths, brick halls still at room height over two kilometres of service galleries that fed fifty furnaces.

The Baths of Caracalla are the most complete of Rome's great imperial bath buildings, and the brick shell still stands high enough for you to judge the size of each room from inside it. The emperor Caracalla opened them in 216 AD as a free public building. Around 1,600 people could bathe here at once, moving from a domed hot room to a cold hall with a pool the size of a modern swimming bath, past two libraries, exercise yards and gardens. Long runs of the black-and-white mosaic floor they walked on are still in place underfoot. What made it work is underneath. About two kilometres of galleries wide enough for ox carts run below the floor, where enslaved workers kept more than fifty furnaces alight and fed them an estimated ten tonnes of wood a day. Above ground the building is bare because it was quarried. The giant sculptures the Farnese family dug out of it in the sixteenth century are in Naples, and one of its granite basins is now a fountain on Piazza Farnese. In summer an opera stage goes up inside the ruins and fences off part of the site.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come early or late, because there is almost no shade — the standing walls throw shadow only at the ends of the day, and the middle of the site is open ground in full sun.
The underground galleries are a separate timed visit with few places — ask at the ticket desk the moment you arrive, because in season the slots are gone by the middle of the morning.
Look down as often as up — whole panels of black-and-white floor mosaic survive, and in places you can see the brick stacks that held the floor up so hot air could pass beneath it.

Things to do

1
Stand in the middle of the cold hall and look up
Walk into the largest space, where the cold pool was, and stop in the centre. The walls rise on all four sides to the height where the vaulted ceiling once began, and because the roof is gone you look straight up at open sky. It is the clearest sense of imperial interior scale left in Rome.
2
Follow the mosaic floor across the exercise yards
Along the sides of the block, panels of black-and-white mosaic run for tens of metres in the open air. Walk the length of one and watch the pattern change where a wall once stood: the floor tells you where the rooms were more clearly than the ruins above it do.
3
Go into the underground tunnels if a timed slot is free
The service galleries are a separate ticket and hold a limited number of people. Underground the ceilings are high enough for a loaded cart, the brick is soot-blackened at the furnace mouths, and the air is cool and still while the site above is baking.