The Flavian Amphitheatre

Today I am going to tell you about my experience at The Colosseum in Rome …………………..

We took the metro to The Colosseum and when we stepped outside of the metro we saw it! The Colosseum was massive. We had a huge tour of the Colosseum which means that we could go to the underground part of the Colosseum and to the third level of seats, areas that normally you are not allowed to go. This part of the tour just opened up to the public. We started off by going onto the ground floor where the Gladiators would fight. The Colosseum was actually dedicated to the Gladiators. Gladiators are people who would train to fight and then fight to the death. We could see where the Emperor would sit, where the more important people would sit and where the less important people would sit. They would sit by class during that time. The less important people would sit at the top and the more important people would sit closer to the front. Titas was the Emperor of Roma and he helped build the Colosseum. It was finished in the year 64 and only took eight years to build. When it was finished, in celebration there were one hundred days of games. In those hundred days of games 5,000 animals were killed. You did not have to pay for a ticket either, as long as you were a Roman your ticket was free. For the Romans these games were for pure entertainment.

2000 year old Trajan Roman type

The underground dungeons

Inside the Colosseum

Colosseum arches

The original marble inscriptions

Contemplating the Colosseum

After that our guide took us down to were they kept the animals and the dungeons. It was so spooky to think that two thousand years ago gladiators were standing where we were standing. We also got to see where the cages were for the animals. There were trap doors for the animals and gladiators to pop up in the arena. There were lots of exotic animals like lions, panthers, hippos and cheetah.  The word arena came from the Latin word sand which is why they had sand on the floor back then.

Finally he took us up to the third level. There were five levels but they were knocked down by earthquakes. We could still see the engraved markings in the marble from two thousand years ago.  It could hold up to eighty to 90 thousand people and it could be evacuated in less than fifteen minutes.While we were up there our guide told us that the real name of the Colosseum is The Flavian Amphitheatre because the family that built it had the last name of Flavian. It was later named Colosseum because there was a huge statue of the roman sun god named Colossus beside The Flavian Amphitheatre and over centuries of it not being used for fighting it became named as the Colosseum. It had so much history in it and was such a great experience.

A Klog is a Blog by Kai.