The Colosseum

The most famous monument of Ancient Rome is the Colosseum. Its real name is Flavian Amphitheatre. The Emperor Vespasian started it between 70 and 76 AD and his son Titus in 80AD completed it. Titus dedicated the Colosseum to the Vespasian death year after. It was having a grand opening by holding 100days worth of games there. The site where it was built there Nero was having a huge villa for himself. While Vespasian wanted to build something for people rather than for himself. It was given name the Colosseum because it was built near that place where Nero erected a huge statue of colossus of himself. That statue was 100 feet high and was the largest gilded bronze statue of its time depicting him as god of the sun. It was moved away latterly and it taken 24 elephants to move it from there.

The Colosseum was the great source of recreation and entertainment for all Roman Empire people enjoys to go to theater to watch plays and concerts, and stadium the chariot races and the amphitheater to watch the bloody sports. There were so many types of furious fights were held in the Colosseum like gladiatorial combats, fights with beasts and individual fights. The Colosseum was having capacity of having 50,000 people. Sometimes people spend whole day in the Colosseum watching sports.

The games were really wild and bloody and for almost 4 centuries men died for that only to provide entertainment to crowd. There were the training schools for the gladiators; most of those gladiators were the criminals and slaves.

At first there were fights to the death between wild animals such bear against buffalo, buffalo against elephant, and elephant against rhinoceros. There were fights between men and beasts also such fights were called venations.

The Amphitheater building from outside is built of travertine and interior haves tufa and bricks. Its outside was decorated with the Greek columns but that don’t support the architecture. The enclosing boundary of the Colosseum is of 527m and its height was 50m. It was having 80 entrances and all were having numbers except the 4 main entrances that were wider than other others were reserved for the Emperor. The Colosseum entrances were designed in such way that crowd could get out in five minutes. Its interior was divided into three parts: the arena, the podium, and the cavea.

Presently the two third of the original building had been removed and so many rows of seats in the cavea are missing. Though its structure was similar to other amphitheaters but in size it was lot bigger.