Which Roman church was designed by Michelangelo from the baths of Diocletian?

Michelangelo designed Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri within the ruins of Rome’s Baths of Diocletian.

Pope Pius IV ordered the church in the early 1560s as a dedication to the Virgin Mary, angels, and Christian martyrs. Michelangelo adapted the surviving frigidarium and tepidarium rather than demolishing the ancient structures, making the project an early and striking example of architectural reuse.

His design emphasized broad, monumental interior spaces arranged around a Greek-cross concept. The ancient vaulted halls supplied the church’s unusual scale and character, while Michelangelo raised the floor to align it with the surrounding sixteenth-century street level.

The church was not completed entirely by Michelangelo. He worked on it around 1563–1564, and Jacopo Del Duca continued the project after his death. Luigi Vanvitelli later altered and decorated parts of the building in the eighteenth century, so the present basilica combines ancient Roman fabric with Renaissance and later interventions.