The Colosseum

After an hour’s ride from the airport, which is about 40 miles away, and an introduction to Roman driving, we arrived about 1:30pm at the booked hotel in a lovely quiet neighborhood inside the old walls of the city. With great apology, the desk manager said our rooms weren’t ready and offered transfer to another hotel about a block away that had rooms ready. He also gave spouse’s brother a gift card for dinner for four at a nearby restaurant as an apology. Once in the room we unpacked essentials and napped a bit. The bus and walking tour of Rome was due to leave at 3pm from the offices of the travel agency located about 5 blocks from the hotel. Desk manager supplied us with city maps and marked the agency location, so around 2 we walked leisurely down there to confirm that tour and the one the next day to Pompeii and back. By that time jet lag was more than nibbling at the edges, confirming that arranging a tour that day was not smart.

The bus part was fine, with an excellent guide fluent in English, French, and Spanish (and using all of them) pointing out monuments and buildings and giving their histories. We had small radios with earpieces so she could be heard at a distance during the walking parts, and this arrangement was common among the various tours.
First stop was the Colosseum (built 72-80 AD), mobbed by tourists mostly with tours, each group like ours following some sort of guide’s shepherd’s crook in the form of an umbrella, or banner on a pole, or numbered placard on a stick. Outside there were plenty of opportunities for pictures with actors dressed as Roman soldiers or gladiators or important Roman citizens in togas. For a fee. Many of the costumes were quite realistic.

Entrance to the building was by ticket, which the tour guide took care of so there was no waiting in line. Navigating through it was quite a task for those in the throes of jet lag, never mind we who live at sea level. The surviving original stairs are not now of even height from one step to the next nor are the treads of even depth, and the edges are well worn by millions of feet walking on them over the millenia. Gotta watch where you are going while simultaneously looking at what the guide is describing…. It was hot in the afternoon sun and a bit humid, more pleasant in the shade but still warm. Hats a necessity, and ours were the crushable kind that fit in the luggage.
Professor Janson, writing in 1962, describes the Colosseum as another impressive feat of Roman engineering that conveys a sense of order and permanence. “Completed in 80 A. D., it is, in terms of mass, one of the largest single buildings anywhere; when intact, it accommodated more than 50,000 spectators. The concrete core, with its miles of vaulted corridors and stairways, is a masterpiece of engineering efficiency to ensure the smooth flow of traffic to and from the arena. It utilizes both the familiar barrel vault and a more complex form, the groined vault,…which results from the inter-penetration of two barrel vaults at right angles. The exterior, dignified and monumental, reflects the interior articulation of the structure but clothes and accentuates it in cut stone.”

The building’s pockmarked appearance makes one at first easily assume it results from the hostilities of war, but that is not the case. With the fall of Rome and the dissolution of the Empire in the West, buildings and monuments were scavenged for their useful parts for service elsewhere. The pockmarks result from scavengers digging to retrieve the iron bolts that reinforced joints in the courses of stone composing the columns supporting the outer walls. Many columns have evenly spaced pockmarks their entire height, some have one or two, some have only the lower portions scavenged. Many other ancient buildings endure the same fate.

Whether viewed from the spectator areas or the arena floor or below it, it is easy to envision it as it was and be simultaneously awed by its design and construct and chilled by its entertainment uses. Well worth the heat, fatigued body, and achy muscles.

Reference: H. W, Janson, History of Art. Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc. and New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1962, p. 134.