Verona Arena

No written source records the amphitheatre's building, and proposed dates have run from the 1st to the 3rd century; Pirro Marconi argued for the second and third decades of the 1st century. The closest comparison, the amphitheatre of Pula, is generally dated to the Augustan period and is so alike in style and technique that some have supposed the same architect and workforce. A life-sized tuff head of a gladiator in a helmet of a type that appeared around 10 to 20 AD places the work between the end of Augustus's reign and the beginning of Claudius's, and since statues were usually cut at the end of a building's construction, Marconi inferred that the Arena was complete by about 30 AD.

That it already stood by 69 AD is shown by Vespasian's war against Vitellius: holding Verona as a stronghold, he found its walls inadequate, partly because the amphitheatre lay just outside them, and ordered a rampart and the digging of the Adigetto moat. In 265 Gallienus added 550 metres of curtain wall to enclose the Arena, cutting its rainwater drains.

The only literary record of its spectacles is a letter of Pliny the Younger, on a friend's gift to Verona of a venatio, a hunting show, as a funeral tribute to his wife. Gladiators' epitaphs found in the city name the secutor Aedonius, killed at twenty-six after eight fights in Verona. In 312 the forces of Maxentius shut themselves in Verona and Constantine laid siege; the assault turned on the amphitheatre, which overtopped the walls and served the defenders as a bastion, and the fighting before it is carved on the Arch of Constantine.

Under Theodoric the amphitheatre was probably maintained and used for spectacles, and medieval chronicles came to credit him with building it. It suffered its worst damage in the same period: a block numbered LXIII found in the Theodoric wall shows that much of the outer ring was taken down for materials and to lower a structure judged dangerous if seized in a siege; the loss of some 12 metres took only the upper gallery. The cavea was quarried for marble after the fire of 1172, and the statutes of 1228 carry the first attempts to halt the destruction.

In the communal and Scaliger city, litigants could settle uncertain trials by hiring champions to fight for them in the Arena, oiled and naked before a crowd; Dante saw at least one such contest and described it in the Inferno. In 1278, at the order of Alberto I della Scala, nearly 200 Cathars captured at Sirmione by his brother Mastino I were burned at the stake inside the Arena. A statute of 1276 confined the city's prostitutes to the Arena; in 1337 the indebted city ceded its rents to a consortium of municipal creditors.

The Venetian statutes of 1450 called the Arena a memorable building that brought honour to the city, ordered it kept closed, with the keys held in the city treasury. Renaissance architects, Serlio and Palladio among them, surveyed it and proposed how to keep it standing. The prostitutes were put out of the arcades in 1537; a restoration approved in May 1568 was halted by plague in 1575, and in 1586 the municipality redeemed the monument outright.

The first documented joust inside was held on 26 February 1590 and the last on 20 November 1716, staged by Scipione Maffei for the Elector of Bavaria, after which the interior was leased to companies of actors and dancers. In 1728 Maffei published Degli Anfiteatri e singolarmente del Veronese, which turned the study of the monument towards its preservation. When Goethe came in September 1786 the Arena was the first great ancient monument he had seen.

Napoleon watched a bull hunt in the Arena on 15 June 1805, and the government then granted money for repairs under Luigi Trezza. In 1820 the municipality evicted 36 tenants from the arcades, demolished houses too close to the Arena and lowered the Bra by about 70 centimetres. In the Second World War the Superintendency for Monuments under Piero Gazzola propped the surviving wing against bombing; between 1953 and 1956 its five pillars were reinforced with Riccardo Morandi's post-tensioned steel cables; from 1954 to 1960 the arcades were cleared of warehouses and shops.

The first opera season was given in 1856, and the Aida of 1913 began the Arena di Verona Festival, whose seasons have run without a break except in wartime. The Arena is protected as Italian national heritage, and in 2026 it held the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics and the opening ceremony of the Winter Paralympics.