ColosseumHistory & audio guide · Rome

Before it was the temple of Roman spectacle, this ground was Nero's private lake, at the heart of his Domus Aurea. When Nero fell, the Flavians filled in the lake and raised on that vanity a machine for 60,000 people: where one emperor once fit, now the people came in. Vespasian began it in the year 72; his son Titus opened it with a hundred straight days of games.

The name, in fact, comes not from its size but from a statue: the bronze Colossus that stood beside it. And beneath the arena —wooden, covered in fine sand— lay a hidden world of tunnels, trapdoors and lifts where the beasts were readied. It even had a roof: a retractable awning, the velarium, worked by sailors of the imperial fleet.

It survived earthquakes and fires, but also the looting of its own city: in the Middle Ages its bronze clamps were torn out piece by piece, and those holes are still visible. What you see today is a fraction of what it was, and still it stands. Ruthy walks you through its insides in twelve chapters, standing right there.