Thermae Beneventanae
About
A monumental bath complex once filled the ground beneath today's Piazza Cardinal Pacca, steps from Beneventum's forum. Brick walls and floor remains uncovered there date to the first and second centuries CE, the decades of the city's building boom under Trajan. Medieval nuns later built a convent chapel directly into one of the bathing halls, preserving its walls through reuse. Excavators have since found a mosaic floor and bathing pools beneath the piazza.
What happened here
The furnaces are lit before dawn and the water is hot by the eighth hour, which is when the town arrives. The circuit is a habit: undress and hand your clothes to an attendant who may or may not be watching them, exercise in the courtyard, sweat in the hot room, scrape the oil and dirt off with a curved bronze strigil, then the warm pool and the cold plunge. Entry costs a coin small enough that almost nobody is priced out, and on a benefactor's birthday it is free. There is food, drink, ball games, gambling, hair-plucking, business and shouting; a writer complaining about the noise from the flat above is complaining about all of it. Men and women bathe at different hours, or in separate wings.
Sources
Nearby
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