The Colosseum (20 page)

There were two main consequences for the monument of this growing preoccupation with its role in a specifically Christian history. First, the despoiling and dismantling began to slow down. This was neither a sudden nor a complete change. In fact, for many years the papal authorities seem to have been making money from the quarry with one hand while blessing the martyrs of the Colosseum with the other. Sixtus V, in the late sixteenth century, is a good case of such vacillation: as well as planning to demolish the building or turn it into a wool factory, he also seems to have toyed with the idea of consecrating it. At the same time the beginnings of a concern for the consolidation and the safety of the structure are visible. Substantial rebuilding started in the eighteenth century (disconcertingly for those who value original authenticity, a considerable proportion of the monument as it stands today is actually eighteenth century or later). So too did strategic demolition of fragile sections thought liable to endanger visitors and pilgrims. In the early
nineteenth century, popes sponsored the two vast buttresses that still protect the ‘bleeding’ ends of the main perimeter wall.

The other consequence was that the Colosseum became ever more incorporated into Christian ritual, and ever more marked with Christian symbols. From 1490 until the middle of the sixteenth century a Passion play was regularly performed in the arena on Good Friday. By 1519 a small chapel of Santa Maria della Pietà had been constructed at the east end of the arena – using building material from the ancient monument, of course. Plans by the architect Gianlorenzo Bernini in the 1670s for a baroque church of the martyrs in the centre of the arena (which would no doubt have echoed his work on that other great Catholic shrine of St Peter’s) eventually came to nothing; the pope at the time, Clement X, settled instead for a wooden cross raised on the top of the building and his painted text commemorating the religious significance of the place. But by the eighteenth century, to the casual visitor, the Colosseum might well have seemed completely taken over by the Church. As well as the chapel, there was the cross in the middle of the arena, the landmark for so many of those nineteenth-century tourists (put up courtesy of Benedict XIV), and tabernacles of the Stations of the Cross around the arena’s edge, commemorating the different stages of the Passion of Christ (illustration 2,
p. 6
). The place must also have been buzzing with religious personnel, from the orders of monks who serviced the shrines to the renowned local holy man who did good works in the city during the day and camped out in the Colosseum at night (he was later canonised as St Benedict Joseph Labre). Here was the place to listen to sermons, take communion, receive indulgences and tune in to the holiness of the martyrs. It was all a bit too much for some Protestant visitors. William Beckford, for example, the builder of the neo-Gothic extravaganza at Fonthill, had no time at all for the ‘few lazy abbots’ whom he found in the arena at their devotions: they ‘would have made a lion’s mouth water, fatter, I dare say, than any saint in the whole martyrology’.

26. One of the most famous recreations of the Colosseum was a late eighteenth-century cork model of the structure as it then stood. It included the small church that had been built at the arena’s east end.

But on a closer look the takeover of the arena by the Church was not quite so complete. It was challenged from two directions. On the one hand, the creeping Christianisation of the Colosseum had not entirely obliterated its early less pious uses. As late as the 1670s (just before Clement’s cross went up on the top of the building) there was a proposal to hold another bullfight there, which was only just prevented through the efforts of a persistent cleric. Even in the eighteenth century it attracted some fairly rough trade. There is a story of how in 1742 the caretaker of the church in the arena was abducted and stabbed, and lost one of his hands (prompting Pope Benedict to close off much of the building). And, of course, the stinking pile of manure remained in the northern corridors long after the Stations of the Cross and all the rest had graced the arena.

On the other hand, as time went on, there came to be increasing pressure from a strictly archaeological lobby. Not that archaeologists could not be Christians, or vice versa. Just as there was no simple divide between despoilers of the building and Christians, so also there was an overlap between religious and archaeological activity: some of the most important early archaeological and restoration work on the Colosseum was sponsored by the popes. But from the nineteenth century on, we start to see a growing pressure to investigate the ancient history of the monument without specific reference to the holy martyrs and to privilege archaeology over religion. To put it bluntly, if you wanted to find out what lay underneath the arena, the religious bric-à-brac littering its surface had to go.

27. The eastern end of the Colosseum is marked by the stark earlynineteenth-century buttress, which sealed the perimeter wall against further deterioration. In the foreground are the remaining ancient bollards that once circled the amphitheatre. In the background, the tents erected for staging the MTV Music awards which took place at the Colosseum in November 2004. The head of Rome’s archaeological service objected to the monument being used in this way: ‘debased, exploited, commercialised’. Unlike the ancient Colosseum?

ANTIQUARIANS AND ARCHAEOLOGISTS

The turning point in the archaeology (and with it the appearance) of the Colosseum came in the 1870s, with the first excavations of the site sponsored by the authorities of the new Italian state. There had been digging, on and off, in and around the monument for centuries, and those with an archaeological bent had repeatedly decried its plundering. In the fifteenth century, excavation revealed parts of its elaborate drainage system. There were some exploratory trenches dug in the early eighteenth century looking for the arena floor, as well as some wildly over-optimistic plans (which never came to anything) for a complete excavation and clearance of the site. Much more substantial work was carried out from the 1790s onwards, digging out the rubble from the corridors, and later (as we saw in
Chapter 5
) uncovering parts of the substructions beneath what we know to be the arena floor. But these were abandoned because of flooding and backfilled. Throughout the middle years of the nineteenth century clearance of unsafe elements went on, combined with more and more unashamed rebuilding. In the 1830s, for example, Pope Gregory XVI sponsored the reconstruction of a large part of what was missing on the south side – a section of eight arches put back as new in nineteenth-century brickwork. But none of this work significantly disturbed the
essentially religious character of the monument. In fact an engraving of the excavations of the substructions shows the tabernacles of the Stations of the Cross still standing around the edge (endpapers); and the central cross was replaced when the hole was refilled.

That changed in the 1870s when, under State rather than Church sponsorship, substructions were uncovered again. This time the religious furniture of the arena was treated with no such delicacy: the Stations of the Cross were to be torn down, as was the central cross – and the then resident hermit (who had a picturesque hovel above the arena) was to be summarily evicted. It caused an outcry from many Catholics: ‘pray-ins’ were held in the arena in an attempt to stop the work proceeding and the Pope himself made his protests. But to no avail. Excavations started in 1874 – the archaeologist, Pietro Rosa, apparently using the threat of a ‘moonlight masquerade’ which had been planned for the Colosseum as an alibi for the work (better an excavation than the profanation of the sacred site with a carnival, or so his argument went). They got much further than the earlier excavators, revealing the complete depth of the substructions over most of the arena. But it was enormously expensive and once more drainage proved problematic. The hole flooded with water which soon stagnated and it was several years before it could be channelled out.

Rodolfo Lanciani, an archaeologist who wrote regular reports on archaeological news from Rome for the English magazine
The Athenaeum
, described the eventually successful draining in April 1879: ‘The stagnant waters which inundated the substructions of the Coliseum were drained off some days ago amidst loud cheers from the crowd assembled to
witness the ceremony.’ But he goes on: ‘Poor Coliseum! it was no longer recognisable since the upsetting of the arena by Signor Rosa in 1874.’ Just over half of the basement area remained on display, while it was still possible to walk over the rest of the ‘surface’ of the arena, until that too was dug up in the 1930s. It is a sad irony that in the very year, 1878, that Henry James published his
Daisy Miller
, with its fatal moonlight tryst under the cross in the arena’s centre, the cross was no more and large areas of the arena were submerged beneath pools of stagnant water.

Religion never fully returned to the Colosseum. From the 1870s it was increasingly established as a state monument and an archaeological site. Indeed when the Pope turns up on Good Friday, as he still does, to celebrate the Stations of the Cross, there is a very strong sense that the monument no longer counts as ‘his’, that religion is being allowed briefly to intrude into the secular world (much as when the Druids are admitted to Stonehenge for the summer solstice). That said, there is a strange twist to the tale of the relations of the Church and the archaeology of the site which goes back to the Fascist era.

Mussolini, predictably enough, given his enthusiasm for the archaeology of the ancient city of Rome, sponsored further major excavations of the substructions, completely revealing what had still been left covered in the 1870s. He also made the Colosseum one of the focal points of his vast new road, the Via del Impero (‘Imperial Way’), as it was then called, leading to the Piazza Venezia and he entertained Hitler there on his state visit in 1938. Hitler was apparently entranced by the building, spent several hours in it (when the planned military parades were conveniently rained off) and saw in its design a model for a mass gathering-place for his
Volk
. But, in addition to impressing fellow dictators, Mussolini was concerned to smooth over the potential anxieties of the Catholic Church. So at the north side of the Colosseum’s arena, the Fascist regime put a new cross to replace the one removed in the 1870s. Underneath they placed four inscriptions in Latin. One carried the words of a hymn regularly sung on Good Friday. Another – matching the tone of Benedict’s inscription (
pp. 164
-5) – recorded a rather euphemistic version of the removal of the eighteenthcentury cross:

28. The Colosseum provided a proud backdrop to Mussolini’s inauguration of the Via del Impero in 1932. In 1970 the closing scenes of Bertolucci’s film,
The Conformist
– set on the day of Mussolini’s death – used the arches of the Colosseum and the low-life that inhabited them as a symbol of the disintegration of the Fascist regime.

Where the old cross stood religiously placed by our ancestors in the Flavian Amphitheatre … removed on account of the vicissitudes of time, this new one takes its place … in the year of our Lord 1926.