Vespasian paid for the Flavian Amphitheatre with spoils taken from Jerusalem in 70 CE. He raised it on the drained lake of Nero's Golden House, returning to the city a valley that one emperor had seized for a private garden. Titus opened the arena in 80 CE with a hundred days of games.
The ellipse measures 189 by 156 metres and once seated between 50,000 and 80,000 spectators. Modern private colosseum tour including ancient city tours follow that same civic geography, moving from the arena to the Roman Forum that governed it.
The engineering remains the more remarkable fact. Roughly 100,000 cubic metres of travertine were quarried at Tivoli and hauled thirty kilometres along a road built for the purpose. Iron clamps, some 300 tonnes of them, bound the blocks without mortar; medieval scavengers later prised them out, leaving the pockmarks that still scar the outer facade. Eighty ground-level arches were numbered so the building could empty in minutes. Three tiers carry engaged Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns in ascending order. Beneath the floor, Domitian added the hypogeum, two subterranean storeys of cells, corridors and winch-driven lifts. Romans have called the building the Colosseo since the medieval period, after the colossal bronze of Nero that stood beside it.
North-west of the amphitheatre, the Roman Forum records a longer chronology. The Via Sacra ran past the Curia Julia, where the Senate met, the Temple of Saturn with its eight surviving granite columns, and the Arch of Titus, carved with the menorah of the Jerusalem triumph. Above it the Palatine Hill holds the Domus Flavia and the Domus Augustana, imperial residences that gave most European languages their word for palace. The Farnese Gardens were terraced over those ruins in the 1550s, among the earliest botanical gardens in Europe, which is why Rome Colosseum guided tours read the three sites as a single fabric.
Decay was slow and deliberate. Earthquakes in 847 and 1349 brought down the southern outer ring, and its stone went into Roman churches and palaces for four centuries afterwards. Benedict XIV consecrated the arena to the Passion in 1749, halting the quarrying. UNESCO inscribed the historic centre in 1980. Around twelve million people now pass through the archaeological park each year, which makes a private colosseum tour including ancient city tour the common thread between three monuments that Rome once experienced as one continuous city.
2 hr 30 min
