The Colosseum

THE END OF THE GLADIATORS

Modern visitors to the Colosseum may feel a sense of frustration in discovering that it is not possible to identify the great architect who designed it. Not so their medieval counterparts, some of whom at least thought they knew exactly who had been responsible for the design. For there was a strong popular tradition that the architect had been none other than Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil, who was supposed to have combined his literary skills with a talent for such arts as magic, necromancy and architecture. This was a fascinating attempt to incorporate a major Roman figure into the history of a surviving monument; and it was entirely fanciful, of course – if for no other reason than that Virgil had in fact died decades before the Colosseum was built.

Not that in this tradition Virgil was supposed to have used his design skills for building an arena of deadly combat, gladiators and animal hunts. The standard medieval view was that the Colosseum was a Temple of the Sun, originally roofed with a gilded dome, and the home of all kinds of demons; and one of the favourite medieval etymologies of ‘Coliseum’ derived the title conveniently from the Latin word for ‘to worship’ (colo, colere). This is how The Wonders of Rome saw it, a pilgrim-guide originally written soon after 1000 (though this quotation is taken from a later, more elaborate edition):

In the middle there was supposed to have been a huge statue of Jupiter or Apollo (perhaps a reminiscence of the Colossus) symbolising Roman power. The story went that when Pope Sylvester in the early fourth century had this temple of idolatry destroyed, he had the head and the hands of this statue displayed in front of what was then the principal Christian church in Rome, St John Lateran.

There were other variant medieval theories about the Colosseum. A twelfth-century English traveller known as ‘Master Gregory’ reported that it had been the palace of Vespasian and Titus (a brave attempt presumably to make sense of a remembered connection with those emperors). But it was not until the Italian renaissance humanists got down to work on classical texts, from the fifteenth century onwards, that the building became generally recognised again for the amphitheatre that it had originally been. Even so the connections with magic and demons did not disappear. In the sixteenth century Benvenuto Cellini, the brilliant Florentine jeweller (even if appalling self-promoter and thug), went to the Colosseum on at least two occasions by night in the company of a Sicilian priest (and part-time necromancer) in order to use the black arts to recapture his girlfriend. On the second occasion this proved a rather too successful experiment in summoning the spirits and the necromancers terrified the wits out of themselves. As Cellini explains in his Autobiography, no fumigations seemed effective in persuading the demons to leave – until one of the party in panic ‘let fly such a volley from his breech’ as John Addington Symonds’ delicate translation puts it (‘gave such a blast of a fart accompanied by a vast quantity of shit’ is closer to the demotic Italian) that the evil spirits took to flight. In the morning Cellini and his friends made for home, not entirely certain they had escaped scot-free. In fact, a little boy in the group ‘all the while… kept saying that two of the devils he had seen in the Colosseum were gambolling in front of us, skipping now along the roof and now upon the ground’.

For us, it is hardly possible to imagine the Colosseum being thought of as anything other than an arena of gladiatorial display and animal hunts. But by the eleventh century the connection of the ruined monument with its original function was a distant one. It had not been used for such spectacles for centuries: the last clear record of gladiatorial combat there is in the mid 430s; animal hunts are known to have continued for a century or so more. As late as 523 the Roman senator and bureaucrat Cassiodorus drafted a letter to a consul (responsible for staging hunts in the Colosseum) on behalf of his master, the then ruler of Rome, the Gothic King Theodoric. In it Cassiodorus deplores the cruelty and excesses of the spectacles, while lingering on their details: ‘The first hunter, trusting to a brittle pole, runs on the mouths of the beasts, and seems, in the eagerness of his charge, to desire the death he hopes to avoid… The man’s bent limbs are tossed into the air like flimsy cloths by a lofty spring of his body’; and so on. But Cassiodorus also makes clear that such shows were still extremely popular (even if, as usual in such accounts, there is a trace of the snobbish assumption that the populace will flock to see what their betters rightly disdain); and more to the point he drafts what is effectively Theodoric’s formal authorisation of the shows, urging the consul, as sponsor, to be generous. How much later this continued, however, is anyone’s guess.

It would be comforting if the end of arena spectacles could be pinned directly to the triumph of Christianity. But in fact, when Constantine, the first Christian emperor, came to power at the beginning of the fourth century, his legislation against gladiatorial shows seems to have had about as much visible effect as a thirty-mile-an-hour speed limit at the outskirts of a British town. Besides, Constantine’s policy was not one of outright banning; we have evidence, for example, in an inscription from the central Italian town of Hispellum (modern Spello) that he gave specific permission in the 330s for the local people to hold annual gladiatorial shows there, apparently so that they would not have to make the difficult journey to those in the town of Volsinii. Some laws were certainly passed through the fourth and into the fifth century prohibiting various aspects of arena culture (senators, for example, were banned from using gladiators as bodyguards). But as with the edicts which during the same period outlawed paganism, the reaction was presumably a mixture of obedience, evasion and complete flouting.

In the end it was not so much the legislation (high-minded, religiously driven or not) that put a stop to the bloody spectacles in the Colosseum and elsewhere. Rather, repeated civil wars and barbarian invasions limited the capacity of the state and individuals to sponsor shows, to procure wild animals and (in the case of the Colosseum itself) to keep up a costly, high-maintenance monument. Behind the series of inscriptions which commemorate restorations of the Colosseum at this time probably lie a series of much more amateurish ‘patchingsup’ of an already decaying, down-at-heel, half-abandoned building than we usually imagine (and almost certainly on a smaller scale than these boastful commemorations try to suggest). In parts the building was probably already being quarried for stone in the final stages of its life as an amphitheatre. The Colosseum and its traditional activities were beyond what the resources of Rome in the fifth century could sustain. Constantine had, after all, transferred the principal capital of the empire to Constantinople (modern Istanbul), with all the funding and infrastructure that went with it. And so weakened had Rome itself been by wars, invasions and natural disasters, that the Byzantine historian Procopius estimated that (aristocrats apart) there were only 500 people there when the Gothic KingTotila invaded in 545. Of course, the terrible decline of the late antique city is almost as much a cliché as the overwhelming grandeur of the imperial capital. We should not take Procopius’ figure as a good guide to the usual population of the city at the time (in addition to his likely exaggeration, many inhabitants with means and sense surely left town – as Procopius implies – in advance of Totila’s arrival). Nonetheless this was not a community with either the human or material resources to keep up a monument on this scale even in mothballs, let alone in working order.

It is perhaps no surprise then that when, on 3 September 1332, a bullfight was supposedly held in the Colosseum’s arena in honour of the visit of Ludwig of Bavaria, people at the time do not seem to have made the link with the activities that had taken place there in antiquity. To us, the resemblances are uncanny: we have some more or less contemporary descriptions of bulls maddened by the blows of their human combatants, and striking out fatally at those who had wounded them; the final death toll is said to have been eleven animals and eighteen humans. To most of those watching, the connection between beast hunts and the ancient Colosseum had been forgotten.

THE COLOSSEUM REMEMBERED

The story of the lifting of this collective amnesia and of the rediscovery (or reinvention) of the monument as a tourist shrine to gladiatorial combat extends over centuries of the modern history of the city of Rome: from the feudal warfare of the medieval town, through dynastic rivalries of popes and cardinals, repeated invasions (of foreign travellers and pilgrims as much as of hostile armies), to the re-creation of the city in the late nineteenth century as the capital of a newly reunited Italy. Throughout this time, while the imperial palace on the Palatine crumbled, as Byron noted, into insignificance, while the Roman Forum gently sank under what was aptly called a ‘cow pasture’ (‘Campo Vaccino’), the Colosseum still stood reasonably proud. Albeit half buried in earth itself, on a more or less greenfield site as Rome’s builtup area contracted, and sometimes flagrantly misunderstood (at least by our standards), it remained one of the most striking ancient monuments of the city – rivalled only by the great columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius.

We may now be thankful that some of the more breathtaking schemes for its preservation or re-use did not get off the ground. In the sixteenth century, for example, Pope Sixtus V, as Murray’s Handbook observed in 1843, had planned the conversion of the Colosseum into a wool factory. It was a project somewhat reminiscent of those of the more enlightened British nineteenth-century industrialists and was, in fact, linked to a much bigger scheme of what we would call ‘regeneration’ of the area around the building. The plans drawn up by Sixtus’ architect, Domenico Fontana, sited the industrial plant on the ground floor of the monument, with attached housing for the workmen on the upper levels. But the immense cost of the proposals meant that they were abandoned after the Pope’s death; instead, in 1594, a small glue factory moved in. Radical as it seems, in the long term such a conversion might inadvertently have contributed to the Colosseum’s better preservation (that is certainly what the French scholar Mabillon thought, when he wrote some years later that ‘If Sixtus had lived, we would now have that amazing amphitheatre intact’). Not so the earlier version of Sixtus’ plans, which seem to have envisaged the total demolition of the building in a major road scheme. This proposed obliteration rather exceeds the rapaciousness of later English grand tourists. ‘If the Colosseum were portable, the English would carry it away’ was one eighteenth-century joke. They presumably often returned home with a fragment of souvenir masonry in their pockets.

In fact the monument was repeatedly ‘carried away’ in a different and less damaging sense. From the Renaissance onwards, it provided a model for classicising architects. Not only was it drawn, redrawn and reconstructed on paper, it was recreated in stone – particularly the characteristic sequence of the different architectural orders on its perimeter wall. The stamp of the Colosseum is to be found in the design of many an Italian palazzo. As early as 1450, the renaissance architectural guru Leon Battista Alberti incorporated motifs from the building into his Palazzo Rucellai in Florence. In Rome a century later, Antonio da Sangallo, who had himself made detailed drawings of the Colosseum, replicated details in his design for the Palazzo Farnese. Sangallo’s father had already taken the orders and articulation of the Colosseum as the inspiration for the courtyard of the Palazzo Altemps (just off the Piazza Navona, and now open to the public as a museum of Roman sculpture).

By the nineteenth century, imitation was as much about function as form. If the ghost of a Roman amphitheatre lies somewhere behind every circular concert hall, the very idea of the Colosseum as a place of popular Roman entertainment is paraded in all the venues world-wide that were built with that name. From South Dakota to Tokyo, there are literally thousands of sports facilities, music halls and theatres graced with the title ‘Coliseum’ (the spelling gives away the nineteenth-century origin of this fashion). Many of these show no trace whatsoever in their design of their Roman origins. But the London Coliseum – now the home of the English National Opera, but which started life in 1904 as a more down-market variety hall – is full of allusions to Rome, even specifically to the Colosseum itself. There are mosaics on the floors; the original carpets carried the distinctive logo of the Roman state: ‘SPQR’ (‘Senatus PopulusQue Romanus’ or ‘The Senate and Roman People’); sculptures on the exterior feature some, admittedly docile, lions; and the decoration of the ceiling includes a trompe l’oeil version of the famous awning used to keep the sun off the spectators in the Colosseum and other amphitheatres. Sir Oswald Stoll, whose brainchild it was, is supposed to have hoped that it ‘would be as worthy of London today as the ancient amphitheatre of Vespasian was of Rome’. As always with these wondrous monuments of international renown, part of their fame and familiarity stems from the fact that they have spawned replicas and creative imitations far beyond their original home.

It is now impossibly complicated to trace the precise stages by which the Colosseum was transformed in popular imagination and in popular use from a temple of demons and an arena of necromancy to a romantic ruin, a memorial of gladiatorial combat and Christian martyrdom, and an archaeological monument. In detail, its whole history since antiquity is a series of bright ideas, dead ends, failed schemes and repeated re-interpretations and re-appropriations. But the key to understanding what has happened to the Colosseum over the last millennium or so and the apparently wildly conflicting ways that it has entered Western culture is to pare those details down to their essentials. Since the end of antiquity, there have basically been just four main interest groups claiming the Colosseum for themselves: robbers and re-users; Christians; antiquarians and archaeologists; and – surprising as it may now seem – botanists. The monument’s history has been largely determined by the struggles of these partisans; its changing image has been the consequence of the dominance of one interest over the others.

ROBBERS AND RE-USERS

By the sixth century, even if it still hosted the occasional animal hunt and was kept partially in working order, the Colosseum was almost certainly in a dilapidated state. Without regular upkeep, dilapidation gave way to ruin. Its surviving structure was an obvious and easy target for those who wanted building materials, whether on a small scale (heaving off a block of travertine for use as a doorstep) or in order to provide the stuff of some of the grandest building schemes of the papal court. For most of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance the Colosseum was not so much a monument as a quarry.

To describe this activity as ‘robbery’ is to give the wrong impression. For the most part, there was nothing illegal or unofficial about the removal of this stone. The Colosseum’s succeeding owners (a motley crew, which included feudal warlords, the local Roman council and various organisations of the Catholic Church) regularly gave or sold permission for ‘quarrying’. Papal records up to the seventeenth century repeatedly include the formula ‘a cavar marmi a coliseo’ (‘to quarry stone from the Colosseum’). The scale of the removal is now hard to contemplate. One entry in the records notes that in just nine months in 1452 under Pope Nicholas V 2522 cartloads of stone were removed; it was apparently intended for use in lime-making in his schemes for the Basilica of St Peter’s. Only a few years before, in 1448, one of the most learned humanists, Poggio Bracciolini, had ruefully observed, not without some exaggeration, that most of the Colosseum had been turned into lime. The same point was made rather more wittily in a well-known quip about the Barberini family’s plundering of the monuments of classical antiquity, in particular the famous temple known as the Pantheon: ‘Quod non fecerunt barbari, fecerunt Barberini’ (less neatly in English, ‘What the barbarians did not do, the Barberini have done’). Papal records from the seventeenth century show Pope Urban VIII allowing this same family (of which he himself was a member) to take fallen travertine from the Colosseum for the building of their Palazzo Barberini.

Earthquakes and other natural disasters no doubt helped in this process of quarrying; with each new tremor more building material would become easily available. But, however it fell down, the great missing stretch of the main perimeter wall of the monument ended up in the architectural masterpieces of renaissance Rome. Apart from its luck in withstanding earthquakes, the surviving northern wall of the perimeter seems to have been preserved partly at least in the interests of papal ceremonial: it lay directly on the road from the church of St John Lateran (to the east of the Colosseum) to the centre of the city, one of the main routes for religious processions. Rather than plunder this impressive backdrop, they allowed the dismantling of what was then the back of the monument to the south.

There is something satisfying as well as slightly sad in the thought of stone from Vespasian and Titus’ amphitheatre having a second life in the steps of St Peter’s or the Palazzo Venezia (from whose balcony Mussolini famously addressed the crowds in the square below). Part of the attraction of the city of Rome is exactly this type of use and re-use, and the way the ancient city is literally built into the modern city that followed it. Yet there is an unsettling irony in some of the connections here: not least is the fact that several of the buildings whose design was inspired by the Colosseum were actually built with stone taken from the Colosseum. If the process had continued there would have been little left to inspire.

Ruins are not just plundered, however; they are also colonised. At the same time as stone was being removed from the site by the cartload, other parts of the building were being taken over for all sorts of domestic and commercial use. Some of this was the predictable kind of squatting. From the sixth century there are traces of animal stalls and shacks and haylofts (something of a well-deserved come-down, we cannot help thinking, for those parts of the building through which senators had once glided without having to cross the path of the lower orders). This kind of occupation continued for centuries, documented in legal records of ownership which refer to small houses, gardens, courtyards and boundary walls nestling in and around the building, and to their owners as blacksmiths, shoemakers, lime-pit workers and so forth. It was here that one early sixteenth-century artist found inspiration for an image of the Nativity, turning this shanty village into a convincing recreation of the humble stables of Jesus’s birth. But it is now hard to recover much substantial evidence of these medieval settlements. The problem, as usual, is that most of the post-classical material was removed by archaeologists in the nineteenth century, who had eyes only for the classical amphitheatre and its decoration (though occasionally they mistook a medieval wall for an ancient one and preserved it!). What is left are some scattered fragments of pottery, glass and metals, and the traces of inserted partitions, patched-up floors and the predictable troughs and mangers. This farmyard air (and smell) continued well into the eighteenth century when – the grandiose industrial schemes of Sixtus V having come to nothing – a manure dump, for use in making saltpetre, was established in 1700 in the north corridors of the Colosseum. The dump remained there for a century, seriously corroding the stonework in the process.

Not all the occupation in the Colosseum was quite so down-at-heel. In the middle of the twelfth century part of the building was taken over by the so-called ‘Frangipane Palace’. The Frangipane were one of the families of warlords who dominated Rome at the time. Like several others, they established their fortresses (‘palace’ is a misleadingly domestic euphemism) in such ancient buildings as still stood: the Colonna family took over the Mausoleum of the emperor Augustus, the Savelli the Theatre of Marcellus. It is a tradition which has not, in fact, entirely died out: there are a number of expensive private apartments, even now, in the upper floors of the Theatre of Marcellus. In the Colosseum, the Frangipane occupied a substantial portion of the eastern side – about thirteen arches in extent – on two levels. They had an extensive residence in other words, even if, we suspect, rather draughty; and for Carlo Fea, in the famous early nineteenth-century dispute (p. 138), they were the prime suspects for inserting the substructures in the arena, which he believed to be medieval. The Frangipane lost control of the Palace in the mid thirteenth century to the rival Annibaldi family, who eventually sold it in the 1360s to the Christian ‘Order of St Salvator’. During their ownership, the Annibaldi are said to have entertained the poet and humanist Petrarch in the Colosseum in 1337; and they would, of course, have had a ringside seat at that bullfight in 1332. Although disused by the sixteenth century, traces of this palace are still visible on site.

What eventually, albeit slowly, brought this re-use of the Colosseum to an end were the activities and pressure of two other groups with an interest in the building. Since as early as the fifteenth century, antiquarians had objected to the despoiling of the ancient monument. Poggio was not the only intellectual to complain of the Colosseum disappearing in the builders’ carts and we shall soon turn to look at the increasingly powerful effect of this archaeological voice. But of more immediate impact in changing the culture of the Colosseum were the interests of the Christians – or rather (as, strictly speaking, almost everyone involved in this part of the Colosseum’s story, from the plundering popes to the Frangipane, were Christians) that growing sense among some members of the Christian community that the Colosseum was a building of special religious significance. The place where, as they believed, so many saints and martyrs had died ought to be a hallowed place of worship, and certainly should not be tainted with bullfights, squatter occupation and piles of manure.

CHRISTIANS

On the outer face of the east wall of the Colosseum there is an inscribed plaque, put up on the orders of Pope Benedict XIV in 1750; it replaced (as it states) an earlier text painted on the walls of the building in 1675, which after nearly a century had faded. Written in Latin, it celebrated the sacredness of the Colosseum in these terms:

This was the high-water mark of the cult of the Christian martyrs in the Colosseum. The inscription was intended permanently to define the monument as the site of the Christian victory over paganism. The year before, in 1749, Benedict had pronounced it sacred ground, dedicated to the Passion of Christ, and threatened punishment for any desecration.

There is, in fact, as we saw in Chapter 4, not a shred of contemporary evidence that any Christians were ever martyred in the Colosseum for their faith. A number of Christian accounts of the lives and deaths of the saints, written from the fifth century on, attempt to fill out and embellish the historical details by claiming that they were killed ‘in amphitheatro’. But there is no reason to suppose that the Colosseum is always meant or, when it is, that the location is anything more than plausible guesswork. More to the point, although it seems to us inconceivable that this tradition should have been completely forgotten through the Middle Ages, the standard medieval view of the building certainly did not link the Colosseum with the fate of the saints. Although other shrines associated with martyrs were keenly venerated, there is no sign of any religious appropriation here. Significantly, the pilgrim-guide to the Wonders of Rome picks out, for example, the Circus Flaminius (another Roman spectacle arena) as a place of martyrdom, while the Colosseum appears as a ‘Temple of the Sun’.

The cult of the martyrs seems to follow directly on the reassertion by renaissance humanists of the original function of the building and their study of the classical texts that threw light on the shows and their setting. A notable fifteenth-century image in silver gilt of the martyrdom of St Peter pictures him outside the distinctive form of the Colosseum – anachronistically, as Peter was put to death years before it was built. By the seventeenth century the martyrology of the place had become a minor industry: long lists of names and dates were published, recording all those (and ever more of them) supposedly martyred there.

There were two main consequences for the monument of this growing preoccupation with its role in a specifically Christian history. First, the despoiling and dismantling began to slow down. This was neither a sudden nor a complete change. In fact, for many years the papal authorities seem to have been making money from the quarry with one hand while blessing the martyrs of the Colosseum with the other. Sixtus V, in the late sixteenth century, is a good case of such vacillation: as well as planning to demolish the building or turn it into a wool factory, he also seems to have toyed with the idea of consecrating it. At the same time the beginnings of a concern for the consolidation and the safety of the structure are visible. Substantial rebuilding started in the eighteenth century (disconcertingly for those who value original authenticity, a considerable proportion of the monument as it stands today is actually eighteenth century or later). So too did strategic demolition of fragile sections thought liable to endanger visitors and pilgrims. In the early nineteenth century, popes sponsored the two vast buttresses that still protect the ‘bleeding’ ends of the main perimeter wall.

The other consequence was that the Colosseum became ever more incorporated into Christian ritual, and ever more marked with Christian symbols. From 1490 until the middle of the sixteenth century a Passion play was regularly performed in the arena on Good Friday. By 1519 a small chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà had been constructed at the east end of the arena – using building material from the ancient monument, of course. Plans by the architect Gianlorenzo Bernini in the 1670s for a baroque church of the martyrs in the centre of the arena (which would no doubt have echoed his work on that other great Catholic shrine of St Peter’s) eventually came to nothing; the pope at the time, Clement X, settled instead for a wooden cross raised on the top of the building and his painted text commemorating the religious significance of the place. But by the eighteenth century, to the casual visitor, the Colosseum might well have seemed completely taken over by the Church. As well as the chapel, there was the cross in the middle of the arena, the landmark for so many of those nineteenth-century tourists (put up courtesy of Benedict XIV), and tabernacles of the Stations of the Cross around the arena’s edge, commemorating the different stages of the Passion of Christ (illustration 2, p. 6). The place must also have been buzzing with religious personnel, from the orders of monks who serviced the shrines to the renowned local holy man who did good works in the city during the day and camped out in the Colosseum at night (he was later canonised as St Benedict Joseph Labre). Here was the place to listen to sermons, take communion, receive indulgences and tune in to the holiness of the martyrs. It was all a bit too much for some Protestant visitors. William Beckford, for example, the builder of the neo-Gothic extravaganza at Fonthill, had no time at all for the ‘few lazy abbots’ whom he found in the arena at their devotions: they ‘would have made a lion’s mouth water, fatter, I dare say, than any saint in the whole martyrology’.

But on a closer look the takeover of the arena by the Church was not quite so complete. It was challenged from two directions. On the one hand, the creeping Christianisation of the Colosseum had not entirely obliterated its early less pious uses. As late as the 1670s (just before Clement’s cross went up on the top of the building) there was a proposal to hold another bullfight there, which was only just prevented through the efforts of a persistent cleric. Even in the eighteenth century it attracted some fairly rough trade. There is a story of how in 1742 the caretaker of the church in the arena was abducted and stabbed, and lost one of his hands (prompting Pope Benedict to close off much of the building). And, of course, the stinking pile of manure remained in the northern corridors long after the Stations of the Cross and all the rest had graced the arena.

On the other hand, as time went on, there came to be increasing pressure from a strictly archaeological lobby. Not that archaeologists could not be Christians, or vice versa. Just as there was no simple divide between despoilers of the building and Christians, so also there was an overlap between religious and archaeological activity: some of the most important early archaeological and restoration work on the Colosseum was sponsored by the popes. But from the nineteenth century on, we start to see a growing pressure to investigate the ancient history of the monument without specific reference to the holy martyrs and to privilege archaeology over religion. To put it bluntly, if you wanted to find out what lay underneath the arena, the religious bric-à-brac littering its surface had to go.

ANTIQUARIANS AND ARCHAEOLOGISTS

The turning point in the archaeology (and with it the appearance) of the Colosseum came in the 1870s, with the first excavations of the site sponsored by the authorities of the new Italian state. There had been digging, on and off, in and around the monument for centuries, and those with an archaeological bent had repeatedly decried its plundering. In the fifteenth century, excavation revealed parts of its elaborate drainage system. There were some exploratory trenches dug in the early eighteenth century looking for the arena floor, as well as some wildly over-optimistic plans (which never came to anything) for a complete excavation and clearance of the site. Much more substantial work was carried out from the 1790s onwards, digging out the rubble from the corridors, and later (as we saw in Chapter 5) uncovering parts of the substructions beneath what we know to be the arena floor. But these were abandoned because of flooding and backfilled. Throughout the middle years of the nineteenth century clearance of unsafe elements went on, combined with more and more unashamed rebuilding. In the 1830s, for example, Pope Gregory XVI sponsored the reconstruction of a large part of what was missing on the south side – a section of eight arches put back as new in nineteenth-century brickwork. But none of this work significantly disturbed the essentially religious character of the monument. In fact an engraving of the excavations of the substructions shows the tabernacles of the Stations of the Cross still standing around the edge (endpapers); and the central cross was replaced when the hole was refilled.

That changed in the 1870s when, under State rather than Church sponsorship, substructions were uncovered again. This time the religious furniture of the arena was treated with no such delicacy: the Stations of the Cross were to be torn down, as was the central cross – and the then resident hermit (who had a picturesque hovel above the arena) was to be summarily evicted. It caused an outcry from many Catholics: ‘pray-ins’ were held in the arena in an attempt to stop the work proceeding and the Pope himself made his protests. But to no avail. Excavations started in 1874 – the archaeologist, Pietro Rosa, apparently using the threat of a ‘moonlight masquerade’ which had been planned for the Colosseum as an alibi for the work (better an excavation than the profanation of the sacred site with a carnival, or so his argument went). They got much further than the earlier excavators, revealing the complete depth of the substructions over most of the arena. But it was enormously expensive and once more drainage proved problematic. The hole flooded with water which soon stagnated and it was several years before it could be channelled out.

Rodolfo Lanciani, an archaeologist who wrote regular reports on archaeological news from Rome for the English magazine The Athenaeum, described the eventually successful draining in April 1879: ‘The stagnant waters which inundated the substructions of the Coliseum were drained off some days ago amidst loud cheers from the crowd assembled to witness the ceremony.’ But he goes on: ‘Poor Coliseum! it was no longer recognisable since the upsetting of the arena by Signor Rosa in 1874.’ Just over half of the basement area remained on display, while it was still possible to walk over the rest of the ‘surface’ of the arena, until that too was dug up in the 1930s. It is a sad irony that in the very year, 1878, that Henry James published his Daisy Miller, with its fatal moonlight tryst under the cross in the arena’s centre, the cross was no more and large areas of the arena were submerged beneath pools of stagnant water.

Religion never fully returned to the Colosseum. From the 1870s it was increasingly established as a state monument and an archaeological site. Indeed when the Pope turns up on Good Friday, as he still does, to celebrate the Stations of the Cross, there is a very strong sense that the monument no longer counts as ‘his’, that religion is being allowed briefly to intrude into the secular world (much as when the Druids are admitted to Stonehenge for the summer solstice). That said, there is a strange twist to the tale of the relations of the Church and the archaeology of the site which goes back to the Fascist era.

Mussolini, predictably enough, given his enthusiasm for the archaeology of the ancient city of Rome, sponsored further major excavations of the substructions, completely revealing what had still been left covered in the 1870s. He also made the Colosseum one of the focal points of his vast new road, the Via del Impero (‘Imperial Way’), as it was then called, leading to the Piazza Venezia and he entertained Hitler there on his state visit in 1938. Hitler was apparently entranced by the building, spent several hours in it (when the planned military parades were conveniently rained off) and saw in its design a model for a mass gathering-place for his Volk. But, in addition to impressing fellow dictators, Mussolini was concerned to smooth over the potential anxieties of the Catholic Church. So at the north side of the Colosseum’s arena, the Fascist regime put a new cross to replace the one removed in the 1870s. Underneath they placed four inscriptions in Latin. One carried the words of a hymn regularly sung on Good Friday. Another – matching the tone of Benedict’s inscription (pp. 164-5) – recorded a rather euphemistic version of the removal of the eighteenthcentury cross:

The two others recorded the date according to different conventions: the first noting it as the fifth year of the pontificate of Pope Pius XI (and the sixteen-hundredth anniversary of the rediscovery by Helena, the mother of the emperor Constantine, of the remains of the ‘true cross’ on which Christ had been crucified); the second noting it as the twenty-sixth year of the reign of King Victor Emmanuel II and the fourth year of Mussolini’s dictatorship. Every political or religious option was covered, in other words.

Mussolini’s cross still stands at the side of the Colosseum’s arena. But the inscribed texts were smashed when Fascism fell. Their wording is known because it was published at the time – and also because archaeologists have recovered a few fragments of the stones themselves. That is the twist. It is a new stage in the complex balance of power between archaeology and religion in the arena over the last 500 years to find archaeology now devoting itself to the reconstruction of this religious monument of Mussolini.

BOTANISTS

It was not only the paraphernalia of religion that was removed when the archaeologists moved in to the arena in the 1870s. As Murray’s Handbook observed in 1843, while regretting that there were no dried flowers on sale as souvenirs, one of the main claims to fame of the Colosseum had long been its flora. For whatever reason – because of the extraordinary micro-climate within its walls or, as some thought more fancifully, because of the seeds that fell out of the fur of the exotic animals displayed in the ancient arena – an enormous range of plants, including some extraordinary rarities, thrived for centuries in the building ruins. The first catalogue of these was published in 1643 as an appendix to a herbal by Domenico Panaroli, scientist, astronomer and professor of Botany and Anatomy at the University of Rome. He listed a total of 337 different species. A hundred and fifty years later in 1815, in a work entirely devoted to the ‘plants growing wild in the Flavian amphitheatre’, another Professor of Botany and keeper of the Botanical Garden on the Janiculan Hill in Rome, Antonio Sebastiani, listed a total of 261 species – the reduced number perhaps connected not so much with Sebastiani’s lack of observational skills but with the major excavations and consolidation work on the monument that would have disturbed the flora in the early years of the nineteenth century.

The most impressive and lavish catalogue, however, was the work of an English doctor and amateur botanist from Sheffield, Richard Deakin. In 1855 he published The Flora of the Colosseum, a magnificently illustrated compendium of 420 different species (though modern scientists have pedantically reduced his total to 418). Deakin had a keen eye for the symbolic value of what he found. One of his specimens was a plant known as Christ’s Thorn:

But if the pious doctor found botany readily compatible with the religious significance of the Colosseum, the same was not true for archaeology – which threatened the very existence of what he studied:

Deakin died in 1873. There is a good chance that he lived long enough to hear of his nightmare coming true. For the first action of the new archaeological authorities in 1870 was the destruction not of the Stations of the Cross, but of what they would have called ‘the weeds’. Today – despite some optimistic calculations by modern scientists which suggest that there are over 240 species still hanging on in the building – the Colosseum is virtually a flower-free zone. One of the biggest items of expenditure in the maintenance budget is surely weedkiller.

Deakin’s words must prompt us to reflect on how we want to experience our Wonders of the World and how the various competing claims to such international cultural symbols can ever be reconciled. It would be naive to imagine that we really should give the Colosseum over to the plants. If they had not been cleared in 1870, the building would now be – as any architect or conservationist will insist – close to collapse and we would have lost the monument, and its capacity to inspire, irretrievably. Common sense suggests that one should feel grateful that nature has been kept at bay and that the building is now well maintained, carefully studied, neat and tidy, and safe enough to host the occasional rock concert in a good cause. All the same it is hard not to feel slightly nostalgic for the romance of its ruins and for those parts of the building’s history swept away in the pursuit of the archaeology of the Roman amphitheatre. It is hard not to miss Deakin’s anemones and pinks, not to mention the church, the blood of the martyrs, the moonlight walks, even the Roman fever…