Note sull'episodio
After the Great Fire of 64 AD, Nero seized the burned heart of Rome for his Golden House, the Domus Aurea, with a private lake and a colossal bronze statue of himself. When the Flavian dynasty took power, Vespasian drained the lake into the Cloaca Maxima and built a public amphitheater on the site, paid for with plunder from the siege of Jerusalem in 70 AD. He named it the Flavian Amphitheater, but people kept meeting by Nero's Colossus, and the name Colosseum stuck around the year 1000. The builders dry-stacked travertine blocks joined by 300 tons of iron clamps sealed in lead, stretched a canvas velarium on 240 masts worked by sailors from Misenum, and moved 65,000 spectators through 76 public arches with pottery tickets and exits called vomitoria.
Seating mapped Roman society, from senators with their names carved in marble to a wooden top gallery Domitian added for the poor, slaves, and women. Under the sand floor, the hypogeum used elevators and capstans to launch animals and artificial forests into the arena, and Trajan's 123-day festival in 107 AD used 11,000 animals and 10,000 gladiators. After the last hunts in the 6th century, it became a cemetery, housing, a Frangipani family castle, a bandit hideout, and after a 1349 earthquake, a stone quarry. Pope Benedict XIV consecrated it in 1749 as a site of Christian martyrdom, a claim historians doubt, which stopped the quarrying.
- The pockmarks on the walls left by medieval scavengers digging out the iron clamps
- How the word arena comes from the Latin for sand, laid down to soak up blood
- The debate over whether the arena was ever flooded for mock sea battles
- Over 400 plant species cataloged in the ruins, some grown from seeds carried in the dung of imported animals
- Gold lighting at night whenever a death sentence is commuted or a jurisdiction abolishes capital punishment