The Colosseum (Rome: Day 3)

Prologue:

I know. I know. “Live updates from France,” I said. “Posting every day,“ I said. As it turns out, I’m an unreliable narrator, but I appreciate you following along anyway.

*cue spooky music*

Here’s a summary of our nighttime tour of The Colosseum.

I’ll keep it short and sweet because our tour guide was an archaeologist who knows way more about this than I do, and I was taking photos, not notes.

With that said:

She was awesome (think Indiana Jones but smarter and without the weird Scottish dad, at least as far as I know)! She walked us through the inner section of the ruins, where the games were actually played, took us through halls where there were (admittedly low production quality but overall entertaining) short movies playing about the history of the building. One of the cool things about taking this at night instead of during the day was that we got access to the inner hallways and were able to wander through spots where gladiators waited to fight and see the elevators where people hoisted huge exotic animals (giraffes, lions, etc.) through a trap door so from the crowd it looked like they just appeared.

The tour did acknowledge that the people doing this work were slaves but didn’t give it the weight that I expected or thought that deserved (maybe because it’s well-known and was so long ago?). It was a little hokey.

Overall, it was crazy to see the way it was built so long ago and imagine that any of the events she described (that occurred almost two thousand years ago) actually happened in the same structure where we stood. And the sheer size of it was pretty overwhelming up close.

Bonus:

Both this tour and our tour at the Vatican mentioned that pieces from this original building were used to created St. Peter’s Basilica.