Rome, The Colosseum
l Colosseo, as Romans call it, began life as the Flavian Amphitheatre, an elliptical arena covering some six acres and seating fifty thousand people. Much of it has gone, but enough survives to read the building as its architects intended.
Vespasian began the work around AD 72, on ground drained from the artificial lake of Nero's Golden House. Titus opened the amphitheatre in AD 80 with a hundred days of games, and Domitian completed it. Building it was paid for with the spoils of the Jewish Revolt, and the workforce is thought to have included many prisoners taken in that war alongside paid Roman engineers and craftsmen.
The ellipse measures 189 by 156 metres, and the outer wall still stands 48 metres — about 157 feet — at its highest surviving point. Fifty thousand is the usual figure for its capacity, though estimates run as high as eighty thousand.
Eighty arches ring the ground floor. Seventy-six of them were numbered, and spectators carried tokens of fired clay marked with an entrance and a stairway, which allowed the building to fill and empty in a matter of minutes. The four unnumbered arches sat on the two axes: one pair for the emperor, the magistrates and the Vestal Virgins, the other opening directly onto the arena — the Porta Triumphalis, through which the gladiators paraded, and the Porta Libitinaria, named for the goddess of funerals, through which the dead were carried out.
Seating followed rank as strictly as the entrances did. The imperial box sat at podium level beside the sand, with senators and the Vestals in the front rows. Women other than the Vestals were placed in the topmost tier, furthest from the fighting.
A day at the games ran to a fixed shape: animal hunts in the morning, executions at midday, gladiatorial bouts in the afternoon. The animals brought in for the hunts included elephants, rhinoceroses and hippopotami alongside the lions and tigers of popular memory. Gladiators themselves were trained professionals and expensive to hire, so deaths happened but were not the routine outcome. The building's long association with Christian martyrs came later still, from its consecration by Benedict XIV in 1749 rather than from any reliable ancient account.
Beneath the sand lay the hypogeum, a two-level warren of corridors, cages and lift shafts added under Domitian after the amphitheatre had already opened. Hoists raised animals and scenery through trapdoors into the arena. Nineteenth-century archaeologists removed the wooden floor to excavate it, which is why the tunnels are now visible from the seating; they have been open to visitors since 2021. A retractable floor, approved in 2021 and long delayed, would cover them again.
The masts and the velarium, the awning that shaded part of the seating, are long gone, but the sockets that held the two hundred and forty beams can still be picked out around the top of the outer wall. Rigging it was the work of a detachment of sailors from the imperial fleet.
The engaged columns rise through the classical orders — Doric on the first storey, Ionic on the second, Corinthian on the third, with Corinthian pilasters framing the attic above. It is the largest amphitheatre the Romans ever built, and its ring of arcades and stairways still underlies the design of stadiums everywhere, though it was not the first of its kind to stand free of a hillside.
The games faded out in the fifth century, and the animal hunts ended in 523. Fire and earthquake did much of the rest, and for centuries the ruin served as a quarry: its marble was burnt for lime and its travertine carted off for churches and palaces until the eighteenth century. Roughly two-thirds of the original fabric has been lost.
The name arrived in the Middle Ages, from the colossal bronze statue that stood nearby. Made for Nero and some thirty to thirty-five metres high, it was recast as the sun god by Vespasian and briefly as Commodus in the guise of Hercules. Its pedestal survives between the amphitheatre and the Temple of Venus and Roma — brick-faced concrete, once clad in marble.
A new travertine plaza opened outside the southern façade in early 2026, after four years of work. Entry is by timed ticket and worth booking ahead; the hypogeum, the arena level and the upper tiers each require their own ticket or guided tour.
