Colosseum
The Flavian Amphitheatre held some 50,000 spectators. Its façade shows Roman architecture in a nutshell: load-bearing arches in four storeys, with the orders of columns as decoration – Tuscan at the bottom, then Ionic and Corinthian. Beneath the arena were passages, cages and lifts.
Vespasian began construction around AD 70 on the site where Nero had had an artificial lake in his palace, the Domus Aurea. Giving the land back to the people in the form of an arena was a political message. The building was financed partly with the spoils of the conquest of Jerusalem. Titus inaugurated the amphitheatre in AD 80 with games that lasted a hundred days, and Domitian completed it. The outer wall is built of travertine from Tivoli, while the inner walls are of tuff and brick and the vaults of concrete. The blocks were held together by iron clamps. The work was efficiently organised, with several teams building different parts in parallel. The building only received the name Colosseum in the Middle Ages, probably after a colossal statue of Nero nearby.
The plan is elliptical, and eighty arches on the ground floor served as numbered entrances. A network of stairs and passages, vomitoria, quickly brought spectators to their places. Seats were allocated by rank: senators at the bottom, women and the poor at the top. Above the façade’s three storeys of arches lies a closed fourth storey, an attic with Corinthian pilasters and small windows. It held corbels for the masts that supported the velarium, a huge awning handled by sailors from the fleet. The arena had a wooden floor covered with sand. Beneath it lay the hypogeum, a system of passages, cages and lifts operated by winches, so that animals and scenery could emerge from the floor in the middle of a performance.
Gladiatorial games ceased in the 5th century and animal hunts in the 6th. The building was then used for housing and workshops and as a fortress for the noble Frangipani family. An earthquake in 1349 brought down parts of the southern outer ring, and for several hundred years the Colosseum was a quarry for Rome’s churches and palaces. The holes visible everywhere in the walls are traces of the iron clamps that were torn out. In 1749 the Pope declared the site sacred in memory of the martyrs, which stopped the plundering. In the 19th century the damaged ends of the outer ring were shored up with large brick buttresses. The Colosseum has become the archetype of all later arenas and stadiums and shows how the Romans combined arch, vault and order of columns in a single structure.