Colosseum

The Colosseum rose in a valley between the Caelian, Esquiline and Palatine hills, on land Nero had annexed after the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64 to build his Domus Aurea around an artificial lake. Vespasian, once emperor, had the lake filled in and a new amphitheatre built on the site. Construction, funded from the general's share of booty taken after the Siege of Jerusalem in the First Jewish–Roman War, began around 70–72. The building had reached its third storey by Vespasian's death in 79; his son Titus finished the top level and opened it with inaugural games in AD 80, during which, according to Dio Cassius, more than 9,000 wild animals were killed. Titus's brother and successor, Domitian, added a gallery at the top to increase seating and had the hypogeum built, a two-level network of underground tunnels and cages where gladiators and animals were held before being raised into the arena.

A fire in 217, which Dio Cassius attributed to lightning, destroyed the amphitheatre's wooden upper levels; repairs were not finished until about 240, with more work in 250 or 252 and again in 320. The emperor Honorius banned gladiatorial combat in 399 and again in 404, and the last recorded gladiator fights date to around 435. An inscription records restoration under Theodosius II and Valentinian III between 425 and 455, probably repairing earthquake damage from 443, with more repairs in 484 and 508. Animal hunts continued in the arena until at least 523, when the consul Anicius Maximus staged one so costly that King Theodoric the Great criticised the expense.

By the late 6th century a small chapel had been built into the structure and the arena itself had become a cemetery; the vaulted spaces beneath the seating were let out as housing and workshops as late as the 12th century. Around 1200 the Frangipani family took over the building and fortified it, apparently using it as a castle. When the papacy relocated to Avignon in the early-to-mid 14th century, Rome's population fell, the Colosseum was largely abandoned, and it became known as a haunt for bandits. The earthquake of 1349 brought down the outer south wall, standing on unstable ground, and the fallen stone was carried off to build palaces, churches and hospitals elsewhere in the city.

After the papacy returned in 1377, a religious order, the Arciconfraternita del Santissimo Salvatore, restored part of the building and occupied its northern section into the early 19th century, even as the interior continued to be stripped: its marble facing was burned for quicklime and the iron clamps holding its stonework were prised out, leaving pockmarks still visible today. In 1749 Pope Benedict XIV forbade further quarrying and consecrated the Colosseum to the Passion of Christ, declaring it sanctified by the blood of Christian martyrs — a claim later Catholic scholarship itself concedes has no historical evidence behind it, beyond the possibility some martyrs died there among other sites in the city.

Nineteenth-century popes funded stabilisation work: the facade was shored up with triangular brick buttresses in 1807 and 1827, the interior was repaired in 1831, 1846 and the 1930s, and the arena's underground chambers were partly excavated in 1810–1814 and 1874 before being fully exposed under Benito Mussolini in the 1930s. The amphitheatre forms part of the historic centre of Rome's UNESCO World Heritage listing of 1980 and was named one of the New7Wonders of the World in 2007.

Since Italy abolished the death penalty in 1948, the Colosseum has served as a focus for anti-capital-punishment campaigning: Rome's authorities switch its night-time floodlighting from white to gold whenever a death sentence anywhere in the world is commuted or a jurisdiction abolishes execution, as they did in November 2012 after Connecticut's abolition. A restoration funded by Diego Della Valle, head of the shoe firm Tod's, delayed by controversy over its public-private funding, began in 2013 and completed the facade's cleaning on 1 July 2016; the top two levels have been open to guided visits since 2017. The Commodus Passage, used by emperors to enter unseen and the site of a failed assassination attempt on Commodus, was rediscovered in the 1810s and reopened to the public on 27 October 2025 after restoration in 2024–2025, with another planned for 2026. Administered today as an Italian state museum with Italian national heritage designation, the Colosseum draws well over a million and a half visitors a year.