Colosseum

First on our list and located closest to our hotel is the iconic Colosseum. 

Widely heralded as one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Colosseum is in fact monstrous. Some brief history. The Colosseum was built later in the time line of Rome. There were many different Circuses in Rome notably the Circus Maximus, which now looks like a very boring grassy field-pictures to come, but the Colosseum is cool because the Romans did a great job building it. You may be asking yourself why they built it. This is a good question. Originally, this was the site of Emperor Nero's palace. He had seized some public lands to build it; this along with his destructive policies and the whole fire incident, made him largely unpopular. Upon his death in a brilliant stroke of PR his successors tore down his palace and built in its place a public circus. The games were sponsored by politicians and other wealthy Romans who wanted to buy public favor. This meant that entrance was free for those lucky enough to get tickets.  

 While best known for the gladiator games, the Colosseum hosted a variety of events including chariot races, boat races, acrobatics, plays, executions, and animal fights. Apparently, Gladiators only fought on special occasions, possibly because of a supply and demand problem. 

 It is clearly rather sunny. When the Romans lived here they had shade over the bleachers. They would bring back the best navy people to run the rigging and sails over the Colosseum. I wonder if this started back when they first built the Colosseum and would flood the whole thing so they could have boat races instead of chariot races. Maybe they just kept all the boat dudes to help with the awnings.



Once the basement was added to the Colosseum, they couldn't have boat races any more because it would flood the basement. But the Romans thought that was alright because the basement was full of storage rooms for storing props and beasts and gladiators and full of elevators for moving said props and beasts and gladiators up to the arena floor for shocking entrances. Now that the arena floor is gone the basement looks like a creepy honeycomb maze of bricks.