Colosseum

The valley between the Palatine and Caelian hills was once a private, artificial lake, the centrepiece of Emperor Nero's sprawling pleasure palace. Following his downfall, the new emperor, Vespasian, made a shrewd political calculation. He drained the water and replaced it with a massive stone amphitheatre for the public, funding the project with the spoils plundered from the Temple of Jerusalem in 70 AD. It was a clear, physical message to the Roman population, returning usurped land to the citizens in the most spectacular fashion possible. When Vespasian’s son Titus inaugurated the structure in 80 AD, he declared one hundred straight days of games. Early crowds watched naval battles float across the flooded arena, a spectacle that ended when his brother Domitian installed a complex underground network of trapdoors and tunnels, known as the hypogeum. Below the wooden floor, sailors from the Misenum fleet operated a massive canvas awning called the velarium to shade the highest tiers. Down in the darkness, winches hoisted bears, lions, and fighters up into the bright Mediterranean light. The stone oval was far from invincible. A lightning strike in 217 AD ignited the upper wooden tiers, forcing the gladiators to relocate to the Circus Maximus for five years while the damage was repaired. Nature eventually proved a harsher critic than any invading army. A devastating earthquake in 1349 shook the unstable alluvial soil beneath the southern side, bringing down the outer ring in a massive collapse. Those fallen blocks did not go to waste. For centuries, popes and noble families treated the ruin as a convenient limestone quarry, carting away thousands of tonnes of travertine to build Palazzo Barberini and the port of Ripetta. By the Renaissance, the cavernous, overgrown archways had acquired a sinister reputation. The artist Benvenuto Cellini wrote of creeping inside with a necromancer at midnight to summon demons among the shadowy rubble. To stop the endless scavenging of stone, Pope Benedict XIV consecrated the arena in 1744, declaring it a sacred memorial to early Christian martyrs and installing a Via Crucis. It soon became a romantic ruin. When the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited at night in 1787, he found beggars gathered around a campfire on the arena floor, the smoke drifting up past the dark, gigantic walls into the moonlight. The modern silhouette owes its survival to emergency interventions in the early nineteenth century. After another tremor in 1806 left the outer edges perilously close to falling, the architect Raffaele Stern hastily built a crude brick wedge to prop up the failing arches. Today, tourists queueing under the harsh midday sun alongside the Via dei Fori Imperiali will notice that these repaired eastern and western ends do not match the original white stone. Faint traces of red paint still cling to the entrance keystones above, exactly where ancient spectators once searched for their assigned gates.