Colosseum

The Colosseum is the great elliptical amphitheatre in the centre of Rome, just east of the Roman Forum. Begun under the emperor Vespasian and opened by his son Titus in 80 CE, it is the largest amphitheatre ever built in the ancient world. For more than four centuries it staged gladiator fights, wild-beast hunts and public executions for crowds of perhaps 50,000 or more. Stripped, shaken by earthquakes and reused in many ways since, it remains the best-known emblem of imperial Rome.

The site was low ground lying between the Caelian, Esquiline and Palatine hills. After the great fire of 64, Nero took over the area for his palace, the Domus Aurea, with an ornamental lake and a colossal bronze statue of himself. The Flavian emperors drained the lake and built the amphitheatre in its place, a move often read as giving back to the public land that Nero had seized. A reconstructed inscription records that Vespasian paid for it from his share of the spoils of the Roman Empire's war in Judaea, which ended with the siege of Jerusalem in 70.

Work began around 70–72. Vespasian saw it rise to the third storey before he died in 79; Titus finished the top level, and the historian Dio Cassius reported that more than 9,000 animals were killed in the opening games. Titus's brother Domitian added the hypogeum, a two-level network of tunnels, cages and lifts under the arena floor, and an extra gallery for the poorest spectators. The building measures about 189 by 156 metres and its outer wall stands 48 metres high, faced with travertine held by iron clamps. Seating was strictly ordered by rank, from the emperor, senators and Vestal Virgins at the front to women, slaves and the poor at the top, and 80 numbered entrances let crowds in and out quickly. The name used today is medieval, probably borrowed from Nero's colossal statue nearby.

The shows, paid for by private sponsors, mixed religion, politics and entertainment. Exotic animals were imported in huge numbers, and Trajan is said to have celebrated his Dacian victories in 107 with 123 days of contests involving 11,000 animals. Early writers also describe the arena being flooded for mock sea battles, though historians debate whether that was possible. A fire caused by lightning in 217 destroyed the wooden upper levels, and repairs took decades. The emperor Honorius banned gladiatorial combat in 399 and 404, and the last mention of such fights dates to around 435. Animal hunts went on into the sixth century; the last recorded, in 523, were criticised for their cost by the Ostrogothic king Theodoric the Great.

In the early Middle Ages the arena became a cemetery and the vaults under the seats were let as houses and workshops. Around 1200 the Frangipani family fortified the building as a castle. A great earthquake in 1349 brought down the outer south side, and its stone was carted off for palaces, churches and hospitals across Rome; marble was burned for lime, and the holes left by robbers prising out iron clamps still pit the walls. From 1377 a religious confraternity occupied part of the structure. Plans to turn it into a wool factory under Sixtus V or a bullring in 1671 came to nothing.

In 1749 Pope Benedict XIV of the Papal States banned quarrying and dedicated the building to the Passion of Christ, setting up Stations of the Cross and declaring it a place made holy by Christian martyrs. Historians find no evidence for this tradition before the sixteenth century, and many think most martyrs died elsewhere in Rome. Later popes cleared vegetation and shored up the walls with brick buttresses in 1807 and 1827, and in the 1930s, under Benito Mussolini, the substructures were completely uncovered.

The Colosseum lies within the Historic Centre of Rome, inscribed by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 1980. A cleaning and repair of the arcaded facade, sponsored by the businessman Diego Della Valle and described as the first full cleaning in the building's history, was completed in 2016. The underground passages opened to visitors in 2010 and the upper levels in 2017. Each Good Friday the pope leads a Way of the Cross procession there.