49 Fun Facts About Colosseum

In 2007 a worldwide vote named the Colosseum one of the New 7 Wonders of the World alongside which landmark?

The Taj Mahal made the list of seven with it, but Egypt's pyramids stayed above the contest: after the country's antiquities chief objected to an online poll, Giza was given honorary status instead.

Which emperor began building the Colosseum in the early 70s AD?

Vespasian died in 79 with the top level still unbuilt, so the arena he began as a gift to the city was finished and opened with its first great games under his son.

By what other name is the Colosseum known, after the imperial dynasty that built it?

Flavian Amphitheatre is the name historians use; the nickname Colosseum came centuries later and is thought to come from a giant statue that stood beside it.

The name "Colosseum" is believed to derive from a colossal statue of which emperor that stood nearby?

Nero had the bronze giant made in his own likeness for the entrance of his new palace; after his death it was given a crown of sun rays and rededicated to the sun god.

What did the Colosseum's site hold before construction, as part of the Domus Aurea palace grounds?

An artificial lake ringed by porticoes and gardens had been laid out on land seized after the great fire of 64; draining it for a public arena handed a private pleasure ground back to the people.

According to a reconstructed inscription, the Colosseum was funded with spoils from which war?

The First Jewish-Roman War paid for it: in 1995 a scholar read a lost bronze inscription from the peg holes its letters left in a marble block, and it said the arena was built from the general's share of the booty.

Which emperor opened the Colosseum in AD 80 with a hundred days of games?

Titus packed the hundred days with spectacle: the historian Cassius Dio records some nine thousand animals killed, a fight between four elephants and the arena flooded so that ships could stage a battle.

Which emperor added the hypogeum, the network of tunnels beneath the arena?

Domitian's tunnels, cages and pulley-drawn lifts let animals and scenery burst up through trapdoors in the floor, a backstage added about a decade after the opening games.

What is the main building stone of the Colosseum's outer wall?

Travertine limestone blocks were pinned together by some 300 tons of iron clamps; scavengers later dug the metal out, which left the holes that pock the walls today.

What was the Colosseum's velarium?

A retractable awning over the seats hung from 240 masts around the top of the wall, and it was worked by sailors, whose skill with sails and rigging the job called for.

Which naval base on the Bay of Naples supplied the sailors who worked the Colosseum's velarium?

Misenum was home to Rome's senior fleet, and with no enemy left at sea its crews had little to do, so a detachment was housed in barracks by the Colosseum, where the men also crewed ships in staged battles.

What is still carved above the Colosseum's surviving entrance arches?

Roman numerals marked 76 of the 80 arches so that each spectator could find the right gate; the four grand entrances on the building's axes were left unnumbered.

What were the Colosseum passageways that fed spectators to their seats called?

Vomitoria were named for the way crowds 'spewed forth' from them, and that is all the word means: the tale that Romans kept special rooms for being sick between banquet courses is a modern myth.

What did a Colosseum ticket, known as a tessera, tell its holder?

Their sector, row and seat: a tessera might read CVN III GRAD IV LOC I, and because every tier was set aside for a social rank, nobody simply sat where they pleased.

Which women were spared the rule that sent female spectators to the Colosseum's top gallery?

The Vestal Virgins owed the privilege to Augustus, who ruled that women could watch such shows only from the highest rows but gave the priestesses a place of their own down among the dignitaries.

Which class occupied the podium nearest the arena and was allowed to bring its own chairs?

Senators also had their names cut into the stone to mark their places; many of the inscriptions survive, and when a seat changed hands the old name was chiselled off and a new one carved.

What could a spectator claim by catching a wooden ball thrown at the Colosseum's opening games?

A slave to take home was among the prizes: the historian Cassius Dio says each ball was inscribed with an item, such as food, clothing, a silver vessel, horses or cattle, to be collected from the emperor's officials.

Jean-Léon Gérôme's 1872 painting of a Colosseum crowd, Pollice Verso, fixed which gesture in popular culture as a death sentence?

A thumbs-down is what the painted crowd gives, but nobody knows what Romans really did: the Latin phrase means only 'with a turned thumb', and which way it turned is still argued over.

The word "arena" comes from the Latin word for what?

Sand was spread over the wooden fighting floor, and the Latin word for it, harena, came to mean the sanded floor itself and, in time, any place of contest.

Which martial-arts star fights Chuck Norris inside the Colosseum in the 1972 film The Way of the Dragon?

Bruce Lee wrote, directed and starred in the film, and he phoned his friend Chuck Norris, then a karate champion, to ask him to come and stage the duel with him.

What was the Ludus Magnus, linked to the Colosseum by a tunnel?

A gladiator training school, and Rome's leading one: its practice arena was ringed with seats, because Romans liked to come and watch the fighters train.

What happened at the Spoliarium near the Colosseum?

Dead gladiators were stripped of armor there, and the name says so: Latin spolium meant arms taken from a beaten enemy, the root of 'spoils'. The scene inspired Juan Luna's 1884 painting Spoliarium.

At the Colosseum, what was a venatio?

An animal hunt: the Latin word also gave English 'venison'. The hunts outlasted the gladiator fights by about a century and went on in the arena until at least 523.

Which emperor marked his conquest of Dacia with 123 days of games and, reportedly, 10,000 gladiators?

Trajan came home to a city full of foreign embassies, some from as far as India, and the historian Cassius Dio says his 123 days of shows killed some eleven thousand animals.

What were the mock sea battles said to have been staged in the Colosseum called?

Naumachiae are reported for the opening games, when ships refought an old Greek sea battle on the flooded floor, yet historians still argue over how the arena could ever have been made watertight.

At the Colosseum, what were the sylvae?

Recreations of forests with real trees brought wild nature to a city crowd that rarely saw it, and the same sets served for executions staged as scenes from myth.

What caused the fire of 217 that destroyed the Colosseum's wooden upper levels, according to Cassius Dio?

Lightning struck on the feast day of Vulcan, the god of fire, and the damage was so severe that gladiator shows had to be held in the stadium for years while the arena was rebuilt.

By tradition, whose death led Emperor Honorius to ban gladiator combat?

A monk, remembered as Telemachus, ran in to part the fighters and was killed, stoned by the crowd in the oldest account; the church historian Theodoret says the emperor then ended the shows.

In the Middle Ages, the powerful Frangipani family turned the Colosseum into what?

A fortress suited the times: Rome's baronial clans were constantly at war and lived in fortified towers, and the Frangipani held the old arena as their stronghold for more than a century.

What brought down much of the Colosseum's outer wall in 1349?

An earthquake did it, one the poet Petrarch wrote about, and the great mound of fallen stone then served Rome's builders as a quarry for some four hundred years.

What did Pope Sixtus V plan to turn the Colosseum into in the 1580s?

A wool factory, with machines on the ground floor and workers' homes above, was drawn up by his architect Domenico Fontana, but the pope died in 1590 before any of it was built.

What use did Cardinal Altieri authorize for the Colosseum in 1671, before public outcry stopped it?

Bullfights were never held: a pamphlet attacked the plan as the desecration of a holy place, and four years later the pope closed the arcades and the Colosseum became a sanctuary.

Pope Benedict XIV ended the quarrying of the Colosseum in the 1740s by declaring it sacred to the memory of whom?

Christian martyrs were believed to have died there in great numbers, and the belief saved the building from the stone-cutters, though historians have found no firm evidence that any were killed in the Colosseum.

What ceremony is held at the Colosseum each Good Friday, traditionally led by the Pope?

A torchlit Way of the Cross brings back a devotion the building lost: Stations of the Cross stood around the arena from the 1700s until 1874, when archaeologists cleared them away over the Church's protests.

What was the marble façade of the medieval Colosseum burned to produce?

The iron clamps were hacked out too, leaving the pockmarks that still scar the walls.

Under which leader was the Colosseum's arena substructure fully exposed?

Benito Mussolini's excavators reached the bottom in the late 1930s; he also drove a parade avenue straight to the Colosseum, levelling an ancient hill and its old streets to make way.

Since about 2000, the Colosseum's lights have turned gold to oppose what?

The death penalty: when a death sentence is commuted or a state abolishes executions, the lights go from white to gold, as for Connecticut in 2012, so a building made for public killing now marks lives spared.

The head of which Italian shoe company agreed in 2011 to fund a €25 million restoration of the Colosseum?

Tod's chief Diego Della Valle put up the money in 2011, but complaints over the image rights the sponsor would gain held up the deal, and work began only in 2013.

Which former Beatle played a charity concert inside the Colosseum for just a few hundred people in 2003?

Paul McCartney kept it that small because the ruined interior can seat only a few hundred; he then played a free show outside the walls for a crowd of hundreds of thousands.

Seen from above, what shape is the Colosseum?

An oval, about 188 metres long and 156 wide: the plan is in effect two theatres set face to face, which is what the Greek behind 'amphitheatre' means, a theatre on both sides.

Which three orders of column frame the Colosseum's arcades, from bottom storey to top?

Doric, Ionic, Corinthian: the plainest, heaviest-looking order carries the ground floor and the most ornate the third, a rule for stacking the orders that Renaissance architects later took up.

The Victorian doctor Richard Deakin catalogued some 420 kinds of what inside the ruined Colosseum?

Plants had overrun the ruin, and one theory traced the rarer ones to seeds that arrived with the beasts shipped from across the empire for the games; archaeologists set about clearing the greenery in the 19th century.

The Colosseum appeared on Summer Olympic medals from 1928 until which host city replaced it?

Athens dropped it in 2004 for the stadium of the first modern Games, after critics at Sydney 2000 had pointed out that the emblem of a Greek festival was a Roman arena.

The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, modelled on the Colosseum, was built for what event that the Second World War cancelled?

A world's fair set for 1942 was meant to celebrate twenty years of Fascist rule; it never opened, but the arcaded white block survived and since 2015 has housed the fashion house Fendi.

The Colosseum's discreet imperial passage is named after which ruler, said to have survived an assassination attempt there?

Commodus was saved by his attacker's vanity: the historian Herodian says the assassin, waiting in the dark entrance, stopped to announce that the Senate had sent him and was seized before he could strike.

Which emperor moved the Colossus statue beside the Colosseum to clear ground for his Temple of Venus and Roma?

Hadrian is said to have had it moved standing upright, without taking it apart, hauled by a team of twenty-four elephants.

The 8th-century line 'when the Colossus falls, Rome shall fall' is attributed to which English monk?

Bede's supposed epigram was probably about the giant statue, not the building, but Byron rendered it 'While stands the Coliseum, Rome shall stand' in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and that reading stuck.

In which Canadian city did Moshe Safdie design a building resembling the ruined Colosseum?

Vancouver's Library Square, finished in 1995, only looks like a ruin: the curving, arcaded outer wall wraps a covered plaza of shops, and the library itself is a plain rectangular block standing inside it.

Modern scholars estimate that the Colosseum held roughly how many spectators?

About 50,000 is the modern figure, worked out from the seating itself; a Roman catalogue of the 4th century claimed 87,000 places, a number scholars now think did not count people at all.