The Colosseum Read Free Page B

entertainment, was in the end another way of emphasising the main dilemma of the nineteenth-century visitor: how to make sense of the murderous games that had once taken place within the magnificent walls of the Colosseum. Was it really like Broadway? Of course not.
    COLOSSEUM TODAY
    The experience of the early twenty-first-century tourists is both like and unlike that of their counterparts of 150 years ago. Once again there is at least the occasional opportunity for moonlight access, but no private floodlighting on request. A modernist lift has replaced the old staircase giving access to the upper floors and October 2010 saw the opening of the topmost level of the building, for a limited period. In general visitors must make do with what is still a fabulous view, but from short of half the way up. The Christian additions have also been down-played. Gone is the dominant central cross,indulgences and the Friday sermon; though a cross does remain to one side of the arena (placed there under the Fascist regime in 1926 – illustration 29, p. 176 ), the Pope still visits every year to perform the rituals of Good Friday and the continued insistence on the stories of Christian martyrdom makes the building a powerful point of intersection between the modern religious world and the ancient. There is even less peace and quiet now than there ever was. If a moonlit walk through the arena was a popular pastime in the nineteenth century, the numbers certainly did not match the almost four and a half million people who currently visit each year. And they are served by a tourist industry which may not offer the dried flowers that the Handbook considered such an appropriate souvenir of the Colosseum, but which does provide mementoes of the monument in almost every other conceivable form – from illuminated plastic to candy and fridge-magnets.
    One way of seeing the changes over the last century or so is as a shift from romantic ruin to archaeological site. Some of the building’s impact has remained more or less the same through that transition. There are very few visitors who have failed to be struck by the vast size of the Colosseum. (Ironically the man to whom the building owes a good deal of its fame in modern popular culture, Ridley Scott, the director of Gladiator , is one of the handful to remain unimpressed; he is said to have found the actual building rather ‘small’ and to have preferred a mock-up built in Malta and digitally enhanced.) But the rigorous cleaning of the surviving remains, the removal of plants and flowers and the exposure of the complicated foundations and substructures have all combined not only to preserve the building and to yield all sorts of new technical information about its construction and chronology; they have also made the Colosseum seem, to all but the most specialist of visitors, more desolate, more baffling in its layout and considerably more difficult to navigate.

    3. Lighting up. Above: the Colosseum ablaze 12–13 December, 1999 to celebrate the abolition of the death penalty in Albania. It has since been ‘ablaze’ to mark other human rights issues such as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against women in November 2010. Below: the dazzling ‘Colosseum’ in Las Vegas.
    Any visitor will almost certainly be amazed by the overpowering bulk of the outside walls; but when they cross the threshold, (queue up to) buy a ticket and peek into the arena, they are confronted by what is likely to seem at best a confusing mass of masonry, at worst a jumble of dilapidated stone and rubble. In fact, there is hardly any surface of the arena to walk on. What was left at the centre of the Colosseum after the archaeological work of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is a maze of foundation walls and industrial supports for the machinery that would have brought up the animals into the arena to face the waiting crowd. Gone is the earth that once covered all this, and allowed the