The Colosseum
Now that life has changed and the girls are doing online school, I added an architectural class to their weekly work load. Here is Sophie’s post from last week I forgot to post.
The Colosseum, also called the Coliseum and Flavian Amphitheater was designed by Vespasian. He was a Roman Emperor in his time. Construction of the building started in 70 AD and opened in 80 AD. The Colosseum was finished by Titus. It is built out of travertine limestone, tuff, and brick-faced concrete. This was the largest amphitheater built at the time and it could hold 50,000 to 80,000 people in the stands. The Colosseum is located in the center of the city of Rome, Italy. The building is 159 feet tall.
Amphitheaters are open-aired venues that are used for entertainment, performances, and sports. Today, the Colosseum is one of Rome’s most popular tourist attractions attracting millions of tourists per year. The inside of the Colosseum is ruined and is not used for hosting large events anymore. There is now temporary seating that can only hold a few hundred people at once. It did have four centuries of use, but people’s interests changed and people no longer wanted to see the types of entertainment that the Colosseum held.
It held gladiatorial combats and other big crowd events. By that time, the arena had also started to crumble from natural events. One of the major ones was an earthquake in 1349. Most of the broken stone that came off of the building was used to build palaces, churches, hospitals, and other buildings in other places of Rome. Ancient Roman people were very good at building, and they made extraordinary improvements in their architecture. Overall, the Colosseum is an amazing piece of work.
