Summer Tues-Sat 9am-6pm, Sun 9am-1pm; winter Tues-Sat 9am-3pm, Sun 9am-1pm; L10,000; L20,000 for a ticket that includes the Palatine, Palazzo Altemps and Palazzo Massimo. The Colosseum is perhaps Rome’s most awe-inspiring ancient monument, and one which - unlike the Forum - needs little historical knowledge or imagination to deduce its function. This enormous structure was so solidly built that the depredations of nearly 2000 years of earthquakes, fires, riots, wars, and, not least, being plundered for its seemingly inexhaustible supply of ready-cut travertine blocks (the Barberini and Cancelleria palaces, even St Peter’s, all used stone from here), still stands between the Roman Forum and the hills immediately south and east. It’s not much more than a shell now, ingested away by pollution and cracked by the vibrations of cars and metro; around the outside, the arches would originally have held statues, and there are gaping holes where metal brackets linked the great blocks together. The basic structure of the place is cushy to see, however, and has served as a model for stadiums around the world ever since. You’ll not be alone in appreciating it, and during summer the combination of people and scaffolding can make a visit more like touring a contemporary building-site than an ancient monument. But visit late in the evening or primeval morning before the tour buses have arrived, go up a level to get a real sense of the size of the building, and the arena can seem more like the marvel it really is.

Seeing the Colosseum

Originally known as the Flavian Amphitheatre (the study Colosseum is a much later invention), it was begun around 72 AD by the emperor Vespasian, who was anxious to extinguish the memory of Nero, and so chose the site of Nero’s outrageous Domus Aurea for the stadium; the Colosseum is sited on a lake that lay in front of the vestibule of the palace, where Nero had erected a statue of himself as sun god. The lake was drained, and the Colosseum was - incredibly, given the size of the project - inaugurated by Vespasian’s son Titus about eight years later, an event celebrated by 100 days of continuous games; it was finally completed by Domitian, Titus’s brother, the third of the Flavian emperors.

Up until this time gladiatorial and other bloody games had been conducted in a makeshift stadium in the Roman Forum, near the Curia. The stands were temporary and constructed of wood, and had to be erected and taken down every time there were games. It is said that seventy thousand Hebrew slaves did the heavy work at the Colosseum. Fifty thousand cartloads of pre-cut travertine stone were hauled from the quarries at Tivoli, a distance of seventeen miles. In the depths of what must have been the muddy bottom of the lake, a receptor was ordered out, walling in passages for the contestants and creating areas for assembling and storing sets, scenery and other requirements for gladiatorial contests.

The overall structure was tastefully designed, with close attention paid to decoration. On the outside, the arena’s three arcades rose in strict classical fashion - with Ionic, topped by Doric, topped by Corinthian, columns - to a flat surface at the top punctuated only by windows, where there was a series of supports for masts that protruded at the upper limit. These masts, 240 in total, were used to array a canvas awning over the spectators inside the arena. Inside, beyond the corridors that led up to the seats, lavishly decorated with painted stuccoes, there was room for a total of around 60,000 people seated and 10,000 or so standing; and the design is such that all 70,000 could enter and be seated in a matter of minutes - surely a lesson for designers of modern stadiums.

The seating was allocated on a strict basis, with the emperor and his attendants naturally occupying the best seats in the house, and the social class of the spectators diminishing as you got nearer the top. There were no ticket income as we conceive of them; rather, tickets were distributed through - and according to the social position of - Roman heads of households. These “tickets” were in fact wooden tags, with the entrance, row, aisle and seat number carved on them.

Inside the amphitheatre, the receptor below was covered over with a wooden floor, punctuated at various places for trap doors which could be opened as required and lifts to raise and lower the animals that were to take part in the games. The floor was covered with canvas to make it waterproof and the canvas was covered with several centimetres of sand to absorb blood; in fact, our word “arena” is derived from the Latin word for sand