Anfiteatro Flavio (Pozzuoli)

Pozzuoli's Flavian Amphitheatre keeps its entire stage machinery: a basement of cages, pulleys and lifting platforms through which wild animals rose into the arena. Only the Colosseum and Capua's amphitheatre were larger in Italy; Pozzuoli's monument preserves an unusually complete record of Roman stage machinery.

Why it matters

This elliptical building of 149 by 116 metres, with an arena floor of 75 by 42 metres, could seat up to 40,000 spectators, according to the archaeologists of the Parco Archeologico dei Campi Flegrei. It belongs to a select group: late-antique glass souvenirs show Puteoli with two amphitheatres, an honour the park's pages reserve to no other city but Rome. Its nearly intact hypogeum preserves evidence of the cages and stage machinery used in the games, as well as the civic resources of a working port colony.

What to notice

Square trapdoors in the arena pavement allowed cages to be hoisted during the games. A central trench, once covered with wooden boards, carried stage machinery east to west, while cages slid on a wooden platform set on stone brackets along an annular corridor lined with two rows of small cells. Around the seating, sixteen entrances fed three tiers of cavea; the ring portico's trachyte pillars were later braced with brick painted red and white. In the southern portico, rooms held the seats of trade guilds, including the scabillarii and the navicolarii, the boatmen who served the port. Fragments of the attic sculptures of Trajan and his sister Marciana survive, and the ambulatory on the south-west side houses the Museo dell'Opera and a lapidarium.

Context and history

Construction began between the end of Nero's reign and the start of the Flavian age, on the evidence of brick stamps naming a freedman of Claudius, and large marble inscriptions at the four entrances credit the colony for paying "with its own money". Restorations followed in the later second century and again after the bradyseism crisis of 1983-84. The monument was fed by the Augustan Serino aqueduct, the same line that ended at the Piscina Mirabilis in Bacoli: park archaeologists explain that water flooded the hypogeum for cleaning, not for naval spectacles. Tradition holds that San Gennaro was condemned to the beasts here; a chapel of 1689 commemorates it, and Artemisia Gentileschi painted the scene of the tamed lions for the cathedral in the Rione Terra. An older, smaller amphitheatre of the late first century BC lies partly under the Naples-Rome railway.