Colosseum

The eighty-foot drop beneath the Colosseum's sand floor is where the real machinery of the show lived. That underground level, the hypogeum, was added under Emperor Domitian roughly a decade after the amphitheater opened, and it turned a simple oval arena into something closer to a theater with special effects: two stories of corridors, animal cages, and dozens of hand-cranked, counterweighted elevators that could hoist a leopard, a painted backdrop, or a gladiator straight up through a trapdoor onto the sand, seemingly out of nowhere. Slaves and laborers pushed the winches from below in near-total darkness, timing releases to whatever the show above demanded.

The building's origin story is stranger than the finished monument suggests. Vespasian began construction around 72 AD on the drained site of an artificial lake that had belonged to Nero's private pleasure palace, the Domus Aurea — reclaiming land the tyrant had taken for himself and handing it back to the public as an entertainment venue, a deliberate political statement. Tradition holds that the project was financed largely with the spoils of the Jewish–Roman War. His son Titus dedicated the finished building in 80 AD, with inaugural games said to have run a hundred days; the further underground works are credited to Domitian shortly after. Even the nickname is a mix-up: "Colosseum" doesn't refer to the building's size but to the Colossus, a giant bronze statue of Nero (later reworked into a sun god) that once stood beside it.

Its life after the games ended in the early 5th century was almost as eventful as its life as an arena. Medieval Romans turned it into housing and workshops, then a fortress for rival noble families; later centuries saw it stripped for building material, its travertine blocks hauled off to build palaces and even St Peter's Basilica. A major earthquake in 1349 collapsed the entire outer wall on the south side, where the ground is softer — which is why, looking at it today, one side reads as a complete ring and the other as a ragged cross-section, exposing the inner corridors like a cutaway diagram. Only about a third of the original structure survives.

Good to know

Almost 5.8 million people visit each year, making it one of the most visited monuments on Earth.

Getting there

Located in Rome. Ciampino–G. B. Pastine International Airport (CIA) is about 13 km away.