Rome

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Colosseum

Notes:If the queue is daunting, buy your tickets at the Palatine and enter directly. During special exhibitions, admission is €11.

Built in AD 72 by Emperor Vespasian, il Colosseo hosted gory battles between combinations of gladiators, slaves, prisoners and wild animals of all descriptions. Properly known as the Amphitheatrum Flavium, the building was later known as the Colosseum not because it was big, but because of a gold-plated colossal statue, now lost, that stood alongside. The arena was about 500 metres (a third of a mile) in circumference and could seat over 50,000 people. Nowhere in the world was there a larger setting for mass slaughter. In the 100 days of carnage held to inaugurate the amphitheatre in AD 80, some 5,000 beasts perished. Sometimes, animals got to kill people: a common sentence in the Roman criminal justice system was damnatio ad bestias, where miscreants were turned loose, unarmed, into the arena. After the fall of the Roman Empire authorities banned games here and the Colosseum became a quarry for stone and marble to build Roman palazzi. The pockmarks on the Colosseum’s masonry date from the ninth century, when the lead clamps holding the stones together were pillaged. This irreverence didn’t stop until the mid 18th century, when the Colosseum was consecrated as a church.

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