The Roman Coliseum

Enormous and imposing on the outside, but just intimate enough for blood sport on the inside, the Roman Coliseum was as awesome as we had hoped. We spent one of our mornings in Rome exploring its innards and imagining the many gladiatorial contests that took place there.


The Coliseum was constructed starting in the 1st century AD and has stood through the ravages of fires, earthquakes, and pillagers. The south side nose bleed seats, for instance, fell to an earthquake in 1349. However, Bill Bryson notes in his book Neither Here Nor There that "the coliseum isn't the hulking ruin that it is today because of the ravages of time, but because for hundreds of years people knocked chunks from it with sledgehammers and carted them off to nearby lime kilns to turn into cement."

One of the most interesting things about the Coliseum interior was a look at the hypogem, or the underground tunnels beneath the now non-existent arena floor. It was from these passages that animals were hoisted into the arena through trap doors.


You can see more pictures of the Coliseum at Flickr.

Champions League Final in Rome

Last night in Rome we discovered that a very important soccer game, The Champions League Final, was taking place in Rome (tonight, in fact). Despite being an enormously important event in Europe (think Super Bowl), we were completely oblivious of it until a hostel mate informed us beer was no longer available to-go in the train station: a city policy aimed to help reduce the rowdiness of incoming fans.

Shortly thereafter, we began seeing (and hearing) the fans of Manchester United and Barcelona storming the city. They carried banners, wore jerseys, and excitedly headed to the hangout spots in Rome, like Trevi Fountain and the Spanish Steps. They emerged in the subway tunnels as if a dam had burst and we suddenly went from a world of indecipherable Italian to a world of even more indecipherable English (read: Scots). The back-and-forth cheers and the rowdiness were really getting started as night fell. They take their soccer really seriously here...a Manchester U. fan, in fact, has already been stabbed a day ahead of the game.

As "adopted Dutch," Laura and I thought the Champions League Heineken advertisements all over the city featuring a Heineken bottle Coliseum were really cool. Turns out the structure was actually in the Rome Termini! Here is the pic, with credit to djmick.co.uk: