Day 7 cont. - iconic tourist stop

Probably the most traditionally tourist site of any in the entire city of Rome would be the Colosseum.  Am I right?  Come on, when you think of the city isn't it the first image that springs to mind?  And in every tourist brochure, there it is, front and centre, right there on page 1.  In the boardgame 'Go' the souvenir of Italy that players collect is the Colosseum. 


The Forum, Palatine HIll and the Colosseum can be seen with the same ticket.  We took in the first two early this morning, and then took a break in between so that we'd resist the urge to be jaded with yet another ruin, even though this is the ruins of all ruins, and returned to enter refreshed and ready.  We were also happy to enter as Rome is experiencing rain for the first time in a week.

The place is pretty amazing and incredibly impressive.  Built after the end of the Roman Empire (a big surprise to me!) it is also the largest building constructed at the time too.  It took about 8 years to build and seated 50,000 people.  Some stadiums today take longer to build and hold less people!  Every knows it was used for gladiatorual combats about it was also used for simulated sea battles, called naumachiae.

May I remind you that sea battles require boats and water.  This is kind of hard to believe - how the heck could they put on sea battles?  For one thing, the Colosseum is really not all that big for such an undertaking and battles require boats to move, turn, ram into each other, so they'd have to be built to a small scale.  The water would also have to be relatively shallow given the space restrictions, so boats would also have to be built with shallow hulls.  Despite the shallow depth, it must still ahve taken quite a bit of time to flood the place and then drain it again, so audiences would have to patient.  And given the fact that these naumachiae were very popular entertainments on large lakes, I would think that audiences would think Colosseums efforts would be quite lame after the novelty of seeing the place flooded had happened the first few times.  Seeing a bit of blood and gore of gladiatorial battles or gfights against wild and exotic an=imales would be much more exciting.

It would appear this was the case and it wasn't long before the Hypogeum was built and these water battled ceased.  The Hypogeum has recently been researched and renovated somewhat and it's strikingly complex and clever.  It's essentially a wooden floor above a series of chambers below.  In these chambers worked slaves who operated trap doors and lifts and cages, brining wild animals and fighters quicky into the arena where they appearedd as if by magic from different spots on the floors.  I can't imainge what it must have been like to work under there in the summer heat with the smell of hot slaves and animals!

After it became disused as an entertainment centre, the Colosseum housed a church, then a cemetery, then housing and workshops, a castle, and almost a wool factory to provide employment for prostitutes (!) before it just got buried by time and inattention.  One of the few good things Benito Mussolini did was to have the place fully exposed and excavated in the 1930s.

There's another side to the Colossum that surprised and fascinated me.  In 1643 Domenico Panaroli, a Roman physician and herbalist, started to catalogue the variety of plants growing inside, some of which were rare and exotic - finding 684!  It seems that the intestinal tracts of all those wild animals and birds that took part in murder and mayhem and violent entertainment spectacles contained seeds that sprouted and grew over the centuries while the place was quietly forgotten.