The Colosseum & Preservation of History

Okay, we’re going back in time a little bit— to Rome! I got too excited about the Venice Biennale to not write about it first.

We were only in Rome for one full day, but we definitely managed to make the most of it. Our first stop was, of course, the Colosseum! This monumental work of architecture was on my art history 250 (no surprise), so I knew a lot of the bare facts about it, but seeing it in person was an entirely different experience. I had actually been before, but I was seven and it was blazing hot in the middle of July, so I think I’ve trauma blocked that part of the family vacation out of my head.

Here’s a general summary of what I knew about the Colosseum going into it:

The Colosseum was built around 80 CE under three different emperors, known as the Flavian emperors. For that reason, the structure was also known as the Flavian Amphitheater. It was built on the site of an artificial lake that Emperor Nero had put in place for his grand palace. The emperor who started the construction of the Colosseum, Vespasian, built it to please/distract the citizens of Rome who were unhappy post Nero’s brutal reign. Building the Colosseum on this site was kind of like a slap in the face to the deceased Nero.

The colosseum was largely built by slaves, mostly Jewish slaves who had been taken prisoner after the Jewish-Roman war. This was sadly only the start of the atrocities ingrained into the history of the Colosseum.

They used many tons of travertine stone as the material, along with lots of iron clamps used to bind the stones together. These iron clamps were later removed, which I’ll get to later.

What was really driven home in my art history class was the stylistic differences of each level of the Colosseum. Each floor was a different architectural order, with increasing complexity from the bottom to the top. At the bottom was the Tuscan style (a variation on Doric), the second level was a modified Ionic style, and the top floor was the elaborate Corinthian style. This is a little hard to observe in person as a lot of it is worn away from centuries exposed to the elements, but it’s still cool to be able to see these connections to Greek architecture being put into place hundreds of years later, especially being a traveler just coming from Greece.

We used a Rick Steves audio tour to guide us around the Colosseum, and despite his cheesy and sometimes tasteless jokes, it was really helpful to gain more context beyond what I already knew. Though I knew that the Colosseum obviously had a very brutal purpose and past, it was still jarring to hear more details about the whole process and the statistics on how many people died in the very arena I was in. There was such a contrast between the mesmerizing sense of architectural achievement and the sickening feeling I got in my stomach just thinking about how death was turned into such a spectacle for the emperor’s will and everyone’s pleasure. The Colosseum is often heralded, but when I look at it I just feel shame about the acceptance of violence that has now been present in our global society for thousands of years. Obviously we’ve come a long way from killing people in an arena while people watched, but not far enough.

This once again made me think about the aspect of cultural preservation, especially in regards to parts of our past with violent backgrounds. Though the Colosseum is now extremely well-preserved and obviously highly promoted, it was once totally abandoned for 1500 years. The iron clampings that held the stone together were gouged out by looters to be melted down, and nobody said a word— perhaps because for much of the historical Roman population, the Colosseum was not seen as the place of grandeur it is now, but instead a place of death. It’s harder to want to preserve a place when it holds such a shameful past of a society that cheered on the deaths of an estimated 400,000 people for entertainment.

Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t preserve the Colosseum— obviously we should, but it’s simply interesting to consider how the perspective on doing so has shifted over time (at least from my speculation). Scientific advancement of course has to do with it as well.

I’ve recently been in Dresden and Berlin (which I will probably end up writing a separate post about), and it’s been an interesting study in how more recent sites of extreme violence and hard memories have been maintained. When we were in Dresden, we were shocked at the complete lack of evidence of the firebombing that occurred in 1945, which basically destroyed the city. I say this with no judgement on the Dresden people for how they chose to move on from what happened, but basically everything had been covered up/refurbished. You would never know that it was the city Kurt Vonnegut described in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five: “Dresden was one big flame. The one flame ate everything organic, everything that would burn.”

We went to Dresden with the mission of seeing the background of this schizophrenic and genius anti-war novel, so we were paying particular attention in looking for any ounce of the city we could connect with the scene we’d read about. We took a tour of the slaughterhouse that Kurt Vonnegut was kept in as a prisoner of war, and were shocked to discover that the entire place had been turned into a convention center. The basement in which he’d stayed during the firebombing was turned into a cloakroom. Ironically, there was a firefighters convention going on above us. The walls were covered in neon lights and fresh paint. Nothing truly remained of this area of great cultural and historical significance.

In Berlin, there are obviously many memorials and museums throughout the city honoring the different dark parts of the city’s history in the 20th century. But still this concept of picking and choosing what to preserve came up frequently, like when we were standing in the middle of a parking lot and the tour guide told us we were standing over Hitler’s bunker where he had killed himself some 80 years before. We were obviously shocked, as it was literally a parking lot across from a day care and a boba shop. Our tour guide went on to talk about how the government didn’t want Hitler or his regime to be “honored” at all from any sort of site preserved in his memory— something I 100% agree with. The depressing reality is that if this historical place was memorialized, it could very well become a pilgrimage spot for modern day Nazis.

All of this goes to say that the concept of preservation being used to guide historical narrative is an interesting one— what we choose to preserve, and what we don’t choose to preserve, have more of an effect on our education than we know. When it comes to history that is tens, hundreds or even thousands of years old, we’re only seeing a fragment of a story that once was. And it’s not even a story— it was real life, something that’s too easy to forget. These are sites of real life suffering and atrocity. Sometimes this pain is shoved behind a curtain through preservation, or it’s put on display for all to remark at the mistakes of the past.

I’m not sure I really have a concrete way to conclude this pensive post, other than to urge you to consider what choices were made in the crafting of any memorial or historical site, from past to the future. Think about if you agree with how the part of history was handled and presented, or if you think we could have done better as humans in honoring these moments of past life.

It took me a long time to write this post (oops) because it’s a difficult one to write continuously about, and I don’t have any real voice of authority in what I’m talking about. This is just some of what I’ve been thinking!

Hope you enjoyed or learned something. My posts on places I’ve been have definitely fallen behind, but I’m planning to keep going back to parts of my travels to write about once I’m home and have more time to write.

More soon,

Emmaline