This first section is a brief explanation of my Italy blog posts, which were inspired by my 2-week trip to Italy in May, 2025. Feel free to skip this section if you’ve read it before.
Dear Reader, If you read my Italy posts in the order in which they’ve come out, it may seem as though we hopped back and forth all over the country, but I have decided not to write these posts sequentially. I want to write about the things that interest me most, as the spirit moves me. For some topics, I may even combine cities. I hope that by doing so, you’ll find it a lot more interesting than if I just give you a tedious day by day description of our itinerary, as if I were your Aunt Mabel forcing you to sit down and watch all her Super 8 films of the family road trip to Niagara Falls from 1966.
If you have any questions, comments or suggestions about how I’m approaching this travelogue-within-a-blog, please let me know in the comments below!
Having the opportunity to visit the Colosseum this year, as well as spending many hours doing research for this post, has taught me more than I anticipated. I was shocked at the level of misinformation I had picked up over the years about this iconic building. Much of it I was taught in school. In fairness, some of it may have been thought to be true at the time. Hollywood movies have also done much to perpetuate myths.
And then, too, there were the things that it never occurred to me to wonder about. What follows are 9 informational surprises. And there will be 9 more in the next post, because if I told you everything today, you’d never get to the bottom of the post. So without further ado…
As I mentioned in my last Italy blog post, I was a bit intimidated by Rome. It’s crowded, it’s busy, and there’s so much to see. So, as we approached it, I kind of felt like Dorothy approaching the Emerald City. We spent a few hours sort of buzzing around its outskirts, testing the waters to see if we’d be welcome.
But I knew that all that pussyfooting around had an expiration date, because I had booked us a twilight tour of the Colosseum that evening, and it was emphasized that we must be there on time or the group would leave without us. So ready or not, we had to dive right into the city center before the clock struck 1730, or we’d turn into…Oh, I don’t know. Some very disappointed tourists, I suppose. And our money wouldn’t be refunded.
I had chosen a small group tour because I wanted to get as much out of the visit as I possibly could, I wanted to ask questions, and I wanted us to be able to stand on the arena floor (such as it is). I also wanted to go later in the day when it was a lot cooler, and there would be fewer people milling about. (And indeed, we turned out to be some of the last people to leave as it was shutting down for the night. Seeing it all quiet and almost deserted was a special experience.)
But before we got to that point, we had to meet our tour guide Jan at the Crown Tours office, which is just a few blocks away from the Colosseum. And me being me — Germanic, Autistic, Capricornian me, one thing I absolutely hate in life is being late. So I had been stressed out about it all day.
In fact, we cut it awfully close, because we took the bullet train in from the airport, and the lines for the ticket machines turned out to be much longer than we anticipated. Trust a new pope to pick right about then to be announced. (How inconsiderate!) It seemed like half the free world wanted to participate in the celebrations throughout the city that evening. Bah humbug. Get outta my way. I’ve got a Colosseum to tour to get to, people!
Anyway, we made it to the train, arrived at the Termini Station downtown, got our metro passes, and then hopped on the Blue Line to get to the aptly named Colosseo station. Since the tour office was so close, that was also the stop we needed for them. That, at that time, was all I was focused on. Get to Crown Tours. On time.
One important thing to know about the metro system in Rome is that much of it is so shockingly deep underground that you have to climb flight upon flight of stairs to exit. Some stations have escalators (although those that do often have them on one flight, but not the next, which is weird), and you might even encounter an elevator here and there, but the bottom line is that if you’re not willing to trudge up quite a few stairs, you may want to just do your trudging at street level. (Unless you plan to take a taxi everywhere, Rome requires trudging in some form or fashion. There’s no getting around it.)
Finally we heard the automated voice say “Mumble, mumble Colosseo mumble…” and got off at the correct station. All the tourists got off with us. The residents stayed behind and did not even look up as the metro whisked them away.
And then for the trudge, trudge, trudging. That did not do my back any favors. But I was going to get to Crown Tours on time if I had to crawl on my hands and knees.
I had such tunnel vision about that, that when we went up our final flight of stairs and emerged into the sunlight, I was, for some reason, taken totally by surprise when the first thing I saw was this:
My brain lurched at that moment. I grabbed Dear Husband’s hand. Wait. What? That’s the… that’s the…the C-C-Colosseum! I was so thunderstruck by this sight that I became one of those obnoxious people who comes to a dead halt right in the middle of a steady flow of foot traffic, forcing everyone to veer around me. (Don’t you just hate those people?)
Have you ever come face to face with something that you’ve been longing to see for your whole life, but have only seen in photographs and videos? If so, then you can understand the sensation I was having. It didn’t seem real. Everything felt unreal. If there hadn’t been so many people rushing to and fro, I might have sunk down onto the sidewalk and just stared at that building for an hour.
The weird first impression that I had, though, was that it was smaller than I expected. I had built it up so much in my mind over the years. (And it didn’t help that the building is ovoid, and we were looking one of the narrow sides.)
Whereas DH thought it was huge. I came around to his way of thinking after I had wandered through it for a while, and had gotten used to the actuality of the place. Yeah. It is huge. That leads me to:
↑ Lesson #1: Just as with people you have always been dying to meet, the Colosseum will never be exactly what you expected. And that’s okay.
But I’m jumping ahead of myself. First, we had to get to Crown Tours and meet Jan. We got there and checked in. Then most of our little group took a seat.
Because Jan was late.
It was kind of funny, actually. I had spent so much of the day (and had lost sleep over it, frankly) worrying about being on time that I forgot I was in Italy, where time is a mere suggestion. But he turned out to be a really nice guy. And we were all issued earphones, so when he talked, we could always hear him even if we hadn’t caught up. (We even heard him sneeze in our ears at one point, which made us all laugh.)
Anyway, and we’re walking…
First, we wandered around a bit of the outside of the Colosseum. Jan pointed out such interesting features as the restoration efforts, and the fact that some of the archways still have Roman numerals over them. The people were actually issued tickets to attend events, and they had to enter through the numbered archway that corresponded to their ticket. No pushing, no shoving.
↑ Lesson #2: To go to the Colosseum, you had to have a ticket.
I don’t know why, but I never thought about ancient Romans dealing with tickets before. I wonder what they looked like and what they were made of. I’m sure there weren’t scalpers out front, because for the general populus, most events were free.
We do know, based what has been found in the sewers beneath the stadium, that food was definitely allowed. They ate various types of meat and chicken, olives, nuts, and fruits, and an ancient form of pizza (very ancient, as tomatoes hadn’t made it to Rome yet.)
That they snacked in the stands makes sense, because many of the events lasted the entire day. Ancient Rome had a thriving street food culture, so many spectators probably picked up food on their way to the Colosseum. Temporary vendors would also pop up in the outer colonnade. And there’s evidence that people brought little portable, makeshift braziers in order to cook meat. It sounds kind of like a tailgate party inside the stadium.
↑ Lesson #3: People had some very creative ways of feeding themselves during events.
We hear about bread and circuses, and that the Colosseum was mainly to entertain the masses in order to make them more compliant and passive, but in point of fact, it is estimated that the venue could only hold about 40 – 70,000 spectators, and the population of Rome at the time was about 1 million people. So how pacifying could the Colosseum have been for the public when 95%, of them, give or take, couldn’t even get in at any given time? Unfortunately, we don’t have enough plebeian writing to be able to draw accurate conclusions about their thoughts on the subject.
↑Lesson #4: Only a tiny fraction of the population got to go to the Colosseum on any given day.
Jan also pointed out that the many pock marks that you see all over the Colosseum are where the iron clamps used to be. Those clamps held the travertine and marble in place, but in the Middle Ages, when people had forgotten how to make wrought iron themselves, it was a hot commodity. So people would rip these clamps out of ancient Rome’s monumental edifices so that they could fashion weapons and kitchen implements and the like.
Also, the marble itself could be broken down to make quicklime, which they used to make concrete (which also accounts for the disappearance of all the statues in the upper archways), and many of the stones from the toppled South end of the Colosseum can be found as elements in other structures throughout Rome to this day. [The North end of the structure sits on solid bedrock, whereas the south sat on the sandy fill of the lake where the Domus Aurea used to be, so it hasn’t stood up to earthquakes as well. (Google “liquefaction” and you’ll learn why.) Those toppled elements were very easy to scavenge.]
Were it not for scavengers, earthquakes, fires and invasions, we’d have a lot more of the Colosseum (and many other ancient Roman buildings) extant, and they’d all be in much better condition. It breaks my heart to think about that.
↑ Lesson #5: Say what you will, the Italians are excellent recyclers.
As we entered the arena itself, we got to see a lot of fascinating architectural elements. The latrines originally had a long bench with holes in it above the flowing water trench. They had no separating walls, and they were unisex facilities. So essentially, you sat down shoulder to shoulder with whomever happened to be next to you, and just chatted away as if nothing were going on beneath that toga. The ancient Romans didn’t view bodily functions as taboo.
↑Lesson #6: The Ancient Romans would scoff at our bathroom legislation.
It was clear that a great deal of thought was put into the design and the construction of this edifice. It had a very elaborate drainage system, and even a water and pipe system beneath the floors to keep the place cooler than it otherwise would have been. The use of archways everywhere offset the weight of the thick and layered walls, which added a lot of stability. Even the repairs that had to be done over the years, due to fires and earthquakes, were well thought out. They patched the walls with bricks at different angles as a way of making the walls more earthquake-proof.
Of course, you can see little elements of interior design here and there as well. The top of a carved column here, a lintel there, a patch of marble flooring that someone forgot to steal. Remnants of the marble benches of the senators, with parts of their names still carved into them. To see this place in its heyday, gleaming white where it wasn’t painted brilliant colors, full of people, its velarium (the canvas, sectioned roof that was operated by sailors to shade the spectators) in full employ… it must have been spectacular.
The architects also put a lot of thought into crowd flow. The design of the Colosseum is rather ingenious. It had 80 entrances. Even when there was standing room only, the entire facility could be emptied of 70,000 people within 15 minutes. There were multiple, wide stairways, and easily spotted exits.
↑Lesson #7: Roman Architects thought of everything.
But let’s get this out of the way right now. The vomitorium. Yes, its root word is vomit, and we all know what that means, don’t we? But it also means “to spew out”. Somewhere in the Middle Ages someone learned that Romans were prone to overindulging in food, then vomiting, then eating some more. Yes, this is true. But when doing so, they usually just went outside and let loose. There was no such thing as a room beside the dining room where one went to vomit.
That same scholar took that tidbit of information regarding ancient Bulimia, and also came across the word vomitorium in ancient texts, and conflated the two. In truth, a vomitorium is a wide hallway, like the one below, designed to “spew out” large numbers of people. So yes, the ancient Romans vomited. But they weren’t so in love with the practice that they had entire rooms dedicated to it. On the other hand, they were quite in love with the idea of safely exiting large venues. And who could blame them?
↑Lesson #8: While there was a whole lot of vomiting going on, most of it was nothing like you imagine.
Another fascinating part of the Colosseum is the hypogeum. That’s the part beneath the arena floor where they kept the animals, the condemned, and the gladiators. It had two innovations. Elevators on pulleys to raise the combatants up at unexpected times, and trap doors that would fall down like ramps, from which the wild animals would emerge from their cages.
Much of the hypogeum was added after the water spectacles took place. Those elaborate events, in which boats actually floated within the Colosseum and reenacted famous sea battles, would have been the one thing I wouldn’t have minded witnessing. But they only occurred twice. Once the permanent rooms were added below, however, along with a secret tunnel that the emperor could use to escape if need be, water containment would have become all but impossible, so the practice was set aside.
↑Lesson #9: It appears that those water events in the Colosseum only happened twice.
While you may have found all the information above interesting, believe me, it’s a mere morsel compared to the pure feast of Colosseum enlightenment you’ll be treated to in the next post, Dear Reader, so stay tuned!
Sources:
Timeline of the Colosseum’s History
Vomitorium: A Passage to the Roman Amphitheater or a Vomiting Room?
A Touch of Rome – The Colosseum Explained
A Complete Travel Guide to Rome Colosseum 2025
Architecture and Design of the Colosseum in Rome
Was the Colosseum Covered? The Story of the Velarium
The Ancient Snacks Served At The Roman Colosseum
The Colosseum in Rome, Combats of Gladiators, Sacred and Political Games
World History Encyclopedia – Colosseum
Smithsonian Magazine – Secrets of the Colosseum
Videos:
The JAW-DROPPING History of the Colosseum in 3D
What happened to the missing half of the Colosseum?
Facebook Reel – The Romans built “vomitoria” that could empty 80,000 people in minutes
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