Colosseum

Landmark · Colosseo / Rione MontiRome,Italy

A four-tier stone ellipse in central Rome, built around 80 AD for fifty thousand spectators, half its outer ring quarried away for later palaces.

The Colosseum is a broken stone ellipse in the middle of Rome, four tiers high where it still stands. Half the outer ring is gone, quarried over centuries for palaces and churches, so the building shows its own cross-section. You look straight down into the exposed hypogeum, the two-level basement that the arena floor once hid. The travertine glows honey-gold at low sun, pocked where iron clamps were prised out. It stands about 48 metres high, and from the platform the tiers of vaulting curve away on both sides. It rose from a lake. Vespasian drained the private pleasure pond of Nero's Golden House and began an arena for the whole city on the reclaimed ground, public space in place of one man's excess. Finished around 80 AD, it could hold something like fifty thousand people, sorted by rank from marble seats near the sand to wooden benches at the top. A day here ran to a fixed order: hunters against imported animals in the morning, the killing of condemned prisoners at midday when much of the crowd went out to eat, and the gladiators last. Its arches stack in the three classical orders, a working textbook of Roman engineering in travertine, brick and concrete.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Only one wall stands full height — the tall arcaded facade on the north side is the sole surviving stretch of the original outer ring; everywhere else you circle, you're really looking at the inner wall.
Pick the open end — one arc keeps a patch of reconstructed timber decking while the opposite side lies open to the pit, giving the clean plunge to the basement instead of planks.
Come at the low sun — raking morning or evening light picks out the clamp holes and the separate courses of stone, which flatten into one grey face at midday.

Things to do

1
Read the exposed basement
From the upper walkway the whole basement lies open beneath you. Pick out the two long brick corridors running the length of it, then the square shafts cut at intervals along the edges. Those are the lift wells, and the sand floor used to close over every one of them.
2
Find the numbers on the surviving arches
The arches on the north side still carry their carved numerals, worn but legible if you stand back and look along the row. The whole arcade was numbered, and a ticket sent its holder to one arch and one stairway. That is how a building this size filled and emptied without a crush.
3
See the whole oval from Colle Oppio
Cross to the Colle Oppio park and climb the slope until the entire ellipse sits in one frame, which is impossible from the street below. From up there the missing half is obvious: the tall arcaded wall on one side, and on the other the lower inner ring, standing where the outer one was quarried away.