Colosseum

Where is Colosseum?

You will find it in Rome, Italy.

41.8902° N, 12.4922° E

The story behind it

The Colosseum was begun around AD 72 by Emperor Vespasian and finished by his son Titus in AD 80, built on the site of a lake that once belonged to the extravagant palace of the hated Emperor Nero. Roman engineers designed it as an elliptical amphitheatre where gladiators fought wild animals and each other, sometimes in front of tens of thousands of roaring spectators, and where the arena floor could even be flooded for mock sea battles. Beneath the floor lay a maze of tunnels and cages, called the hypogeum, where fighters and animals waited before being lifted up through trapdoors. Over the centuries, earthquakes, fires and stone-robbers who reused its marble for other buildings left it in ruins. Today visitors can walk through its arches, climb to the upper tiers, and peer down into the exposed hypogeum, imagining the roar of the ancient crowd.

Find it on the globe

Colosseum is there as a little three-dimensional model of the building itself. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.

It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.

How was it built?

Roman builders used travertine limestone for the outer walls, hauled from quarries 30 kilometres away on ox carts, along with volcanic tuff and brick-faced concrete for the inner structure, an early superstrength Roman building material. An estimated 60,000 Jewish prisoners, along with skilled Roman engineers and craftsmen, worked on the site. Builders cut precise stone blocks and stacked them without mortar in the outer arcades, held together partly by iron clamps. The whole structure took under ten years to complete.