It's the Roman Colosseum, of course. Construction on it began around 70 AD. It's pretty much impossible to wrap your head around the idea that you're standing beside a building that was built by human beings 2000 years ago. What can you say?
The Colosseum was used for many things, but mostly Gladiator events where big burly men would fight various ferocious beasts, inlcuding each other. The events were watched by as many as fifty thousand spectators.
Today it's full of camera-toting Asians, mostly.
Right beside the Colosseum is the Arch of Constantine, constructed in the 4th century AD, commemorating a military victory. Emperor Constantine I is the guy who made the Roman Empire into the Holy Roman Empire: he converted to Christianity after having a particularly vivid dream. For a time, the city known as Istanbul today took his namesake and was called Constantinople.
The Colosseum is great and all (we elected not to go inside, seeing as it takes a fee and was jammed with people), but what really caught my eye was the vast expanse beside it.
This is the Roman Imperial Fora (plural for Forum). It was the administrative heart of the Roman Empire in the period from 5th century BC to around 6th century AD.
It's mindblowing to look at.
I still find the history of the site to be almost unbelievable, but this seems to be more or less how it went:
After the Empire collapsed, around 6th century AD, the Forum area was basically let go. Parts of it flooded (it was originally marsh land) and the buildings crumbled and became covered in debris. At one point the grounds were actually used as cattle-grazing land.
For about the next 1300 (!) years, the city just moved on while the grounds of the Forum and Colosseum decayed. Many of the buildings and columns were plundered for new construction projects, particularly for projects commissioned by the Catholic Church. That courtyard outside St. Peter's Basilica, for example, contains numerous stones and valuable metals that were ripped off of ancient Roman Empire monuments.
Finally, at the turn of the 19th century, the grounds began to be drained and excavated. Napoleon had just conquered Italy, and it was under his directions that the old monuments were unearthed. (He also took a lot of art from the Vatican collections to be placed in the Louvre.)
After Napoleon's reign ended, it wasn't until a new strongman came on the Italian scene that the excavations were continued: Mussolini. Mussolini's fascism in the 1930s was less fanatical than Hitler's, but he was nothing if not an Italian nationalist and he had a strong appreciation for the glory days of the empire run from Italy.
(Such nationalism is nice for keeping the history of countries alive, but it's also what launched Europe into two horrifically bloody wars in the 20th century--the bloodiest the world has and hopefully ever will see. The European Union is the project that's working to keep such urges in check today. But irrational nationalism still hasn't died; I've met Belgians who are proud of their country.)
The final strong push for excavations and archeological work on the site came in the 1990s, and work is still ongoing.
Obviously all those buildings above have an incredible story behind them, but I'll pick out a few interesting tidbits to expound on here.
For all the work Mussolini did on the Forum area, he also made the rather controversial move of constructing a massive road through part of the grounds. The road supposedly did wonders for traffic management in congested Rome, but it paved over many ancient sites that are still buried underneath.
Read this next paragraph carefully: the photo below is part of the Temple of Romulus, constructed in the 4th century AD. It was built as a memorial to his dead son. The doors that you can see on the temple today, made of solid bronze, are the original doors. That would make them about 1700 years old. The hinges apparently still work.
Below is the most striking structure in the Forum area. It's the Basilica of Maxentius, a gargantuan temple that was actually completed by his successor as emperor, Constantine. It's difficult to get a sense of just how big those arches are from pictures: they are HUGE.
I can't understand how they built such structures so long ago.
Inside the temple was the Colossus of Constantine. It was a statue of himself and is estimated to have been 40 feet tall. The little toe on each foot was said to be the size of a normal person's waist. Fragments of the statue can be seen today in one of the museums in Rome.
Some of the detail on the buildings can still be seen clearly, such as on the arch below. You can almost imagine how impressive the whole area must have once looked.
Towering in the background is Palatine Hill. It's the most important of the 'seven hills' of Rome; it's here that the first settlers of the city probably lived.
During the Roman Empire it was the site of a lavish palace complex. Today it's a large, eerie set of ruins.
The Hippodrome was part of the palace. It was probably a private site for the rich and powerful to watch sporting events, though some archeologists claim it was just a fancy garden.
From the top of Palatine Hill we looked down over the Forum grounds. You don't get views like this in Canada.
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