The Roman bath hall
The vaults and columns are original to the Baths of Diocletian โ you stand inside a standing Roman building, not a ruin.
Gustavo La Pizza โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Enrica Ridolfi โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Greymouser โ CC BY-SA 4.0 ยท Amphipolis โ CC BY-SA 2.0
Yes if you are near Termini or Piazza della Repubblica โ twenty free minutes for Michelangelo's last building inside a Roman bath. Pair it with Palazzo Massimo five minutes away.
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A church built inside the central hall of the Baths of Diocletian โ the largest baths Rome ever built โ and designed by Michelangelo in 1561 at the age of eighty-six, his last work of architecture. The genius of the design is that he demolished almost nothing: he left the Roman walls and vaults as they stood and turned a pagan void into a church with the least possible intervention. The eight huge granite columns are original fourth-century work, and the ceiling keeps its Roman height. You enter through a faรงade that is literally a broken Roman bath wall, and find yourself in an enormous cool space. Set into the floor is the meridian line โ a forty-five-metre sundial laid in 1702 to fix the date of Easter precisely: a sunbeam falls through a hole high in the wall onto the bronze line at noon, its position shifting daily through the year. Entry is free, and the church stands on Piazza della Repubblica opposite Repubblica metro station.
The vaults and columns are original to the Baths of Diocletian โ you stand inside a standing Roman building, not a ruin.
A forty-five-metre floor sundial from 1702 that still works โ astronomy laid into a church floor.
The entrance is a broken Roman bath wall left exactly as found โ the strangest church front in Rome.
Piazza della Repubblica, Rome
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