The Terme di Diocleziano is one of the four buildings which are part of the National Museum of Rome, along with Palazzo Massimo, Palazzo Altemps and Crypta Balbi. The Terme di Diocleziano was the original home of the National Museum of Rome, from 1889. It today houses sculptures, a section of proto-history of the Latin peoples, and a section on written communication in the Roman world. Also you can see the Michelangelo Cloister, with funerary monuments around the outside of it, and the 7 huge animal heads from the Temple of Divine Trajan in the center, and finally the spectacular Hall X of the Baths of Diocletian, an impressively huge hall with special displays inside.

Because of that final Hall X, I would rate this museum as a second-tier museum, nearly as good as the National Museum of Rome - Palazzo Massimo. Since the two museums are covered by the same admission charge, and only a block apart from each other, you can easily tack this museum onto the back of a visit to the National Museum of Rome - Palazzo Massimo and spend the full 90 minutes I suggest, or just see Hall X for 20 minutes, whatever suits your timing needs and interests best.

Enter the museum on the side of the building on Viale Enrico de Nicola. You'll pass through a The Garden of the Cinquecento where you'll find the huge marble Krater in the 1st photo below, 6-feet tall, at the center of a round fountain. The entrance to the museum is near where the two people in the background are standing.

    

The Entrance Hall displays several sculptures and other artefacts. The marble statue of Junius Brutus is not from ancient times, but rather a sculpture inspired by the Capitoline Brutus.

                   

The next section of the museum is the most "museum-like" part, an indoor section divided into rooms. It's called the Epigraphic Museum since it displays many inscriptions. Room V of the epigraph museum, split between the ground floor and the mezzanine, and subsequent rooms contain many sculptures of the Emperors, and that was my favorite part of the Epigraphic Museum. The photos below are from the Epigraphic Museum.

                                                                                                                                                                         

Another part of the museum is outdoors, Michelangelo's Cloister, so named because Michelangelo did at least the preliminary design of this cloister for the Church of Madonna degli Angeli before his death in 1564. The 1st photo below gives perhaps the best overview of the square cloister, and following photos show some more detailed views. The porticoes on the four sides contain sculptures, sarcophagi, and statue bases.

                             

The center of the cloister has a fountain (1st photo below) surrounded by colossal heads of 7 animals (a Ram, an Elephant, a Rhinoceros, a Camel, a Horse, a Bull and an Ox) which were found in 1586 in an place suggesting they were originally inside the no-longer-existing Temple of Divine Trajan, in Trajan's Forum, except for the Rhino and Elephant heads which were carved during the Renaissance period. In 1878 the heads were moved to the Roman College, and they were moved in the early 1900s to the Michelangelo Cloister, circling the fountain of the garden which was built in 1695.

    

                                                 

On the upper floor of the arcades Michelangelo's Cloister is a Museum of Prehistory which I didn't find interesting or photograph.

There is also a Small Cloister next to the Michelangelo Cloister. The small cloister of the charterhouse occupies around a third of the area previously occupied by the natatio (swimming pool) of the Baths of Diocletian. It was originally built alongside the church. Construction began in the mid-16th century but continued beyond the 17th century. The late 16th-century travertine well in the centre was added during the recent renovation of the cloister.

                   

Next is the Aule delle Olearie section of the museum, my favorite section by far. These were the storage facilities created by Pope Clement XIII in some of the former halls of the Baths of Diocletian. These large halls (numbered Hall I to XI), most of them without roof cover, have been part of the museum since 1911. Beside displaying the architecture of the Baths themselves, they hold extremely significant artefacts, as shown in the photos below, displayed in the order I happened to travel through them. In the captions, I noted the Hall number where I have actually been able to identify which hall it was in. I cannot do this for most of the photos.

First I'm starting (uncertainly) with a section of the Forma Urbis and the cast of the Lapis Niger Cippus in the model of the Volcanal. The Lapis Niger is believed to be the 5th century BC gravestone of Rome's first king, Romulus. Believed to be the oldest known Latin inscription and dating back to the second quarter of the sixth century BC, the inscribed cippus reads vertically and in boustrophedon, an archaic technique in which the words are written from right to left and then from left to right in alternating lines. The Volcanal is a monument buried under the paving stones in front of the Roman Forum's Curia, called the Comitium. After that is 8 more photos from the same area of the museum. I'm separating these out from Hall I to XI because I'm not sure exactly where they are - they might even be in the Epigraphic Museum, but they're somewhere before Hall IX.

    

                                                                                                             

Hall IX

                                                           

The Natatorio, restored and opened between 2013 and 2014

                                                                                                   

Hall VIII

                                            

Hall IX

                                                                                                   

Hall X

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Hall XI

                             

See also:

• My National Museum of Rome - Terme di Diocleziano photos
• Official website of the National Museum of Rome - Terme di Diocleziano