Colosseum

Where it sits. The Colosseum stands in the valley between the Esquiline, Palatine and Caelian hills, at the eastern end of the Roman Forum and beside the Arch of Constantine. The ground it occupies was once the ornamental lake of Nero's Domus Aurea, drained by the Flavian emperors in a deliberate act of political reversal: the ground a hated emperor had taken for his private pleasure grounds was handed back to the city as a public arena. The colossal bronze statue of Nero that stood nearby, later reworked as a sun god, is the likeliest source of the medieval nickname that displaced the building's proper name, the Flavian Amphitheatre.

The building. Construction began under Vespasian around AD 72, and Titus inaugurated the finished arena in AD 80 with a hundred days of games; Domitian added the top storey and the basement works before AD 96. The ellipse measures about 189 by 156 metres, with an outer wall originally close to 48 metres high, and estimates of capacity cluster around 50,000 spectators. The outer arcades are Tivoli travertine, the radial walls tufa and brick-faced concrete, and the whole was held together by iron clamps rather than mortar in the joints. Those clamps were pried out for reuse in the Middle Ages, which is why the surviving stone is covered in rectangular pits. Eighty numbered entrances fed a system of stairs and vaulted passages designed to empty the building in minutes, and an awning called the velarium was rigged over the seating by sailors detached from the imperial fleet at Misenum.

Under the floor. The hypogeum is a two-storey basement of brick corridors, animal pens and thirty-two winch-driven lifts that delivered beasts and scenery to trapdoors in the arena floor. It was buried for centuries and is now open on the more expensive tickets, along with a partly rebuilt section of the wooden arena deck and the fourth-tier gallery with its view across the Forum. Two earthquakes, in 847 and 1349, brought down the outer wall on the southern side, and the fallen travertine was quarried for palaces and for the new basilica of Saint Peter. The building was consecrated to the Passion of Christ in 1749 by Benedict XIV, which halted the quarrying, and a papal Way of the Cross is still held there on Good Friday.

On screen — and where the film was really made. Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000) is the production most people associate with this building, and it never shot inside it. The arena scenes were staged on a partial replica built at Fort Ricasoli in Kalkara, Malta — roughly a third of the bowl, standing about sixteen metres high — with the upper tiers, the far side and most of the crowd added digitally by the visual effects house The Mill, work that won an Academy Award. The rest of the film scattered across four countries: the opening battle against the Germanic tribes was shot in Bourne Wood in Surrey, the North African slave market at Aït Benhaddou and around Ouarzazate in Morocco, and Maximus's ruined farm and the closing wheat field in the Val d'Orcia in Tuscany. Oliver Reed died in Valletta during the Malta shoot in May 1999, and his remaining scenes were completed with a body double and a digital face at considerable expense. The real Colosseum has appeared on film mostly in exteriors — establishing shots in Roman Holiday (1953) among many others, and the Rome sequences of Bruce Lee's The Way of the Dragon (1972), which stages its closing duel against Chuck Norris inside the amphitheatre.

What you actually see today. Entry is by timed ticket, and the standard admission covers the ground tier and the first raised gallery. The upgraded ticket adds the hypogeum and the arena level, which is the only way to stand where the fighters entered, and both include the Roman Forum and the Palatine on a linked itinerary. Interpretation panels are sparse; a guide or a good audio tour materially changes the visit. A permanent retractable arena floor has been designed and approved, which would eventually restore the sense of an enclosed oval and cover the exposed basement.

Getting there and timing. Colosseo station on Metro Line B surfaces directly opposite, and trams and buses along Via Labicana stop nearby. Opening is early, usually 08:30, and the first hour is by far the calmest; the last two hours before closing are the second-best window, with low sun raking across the travertine. Summer queues at the security check can run to an hour even with a timed slot, so booking a specific entry time online well in advance matters more here than at any other Roman site. Winter visits are cold but uncrowded and the low light suits the ruin.