Museo dei Gladiatori

Beside the great amphitheatre stands the small museum that explains it: two rooms on the gladiatorial games of ancient Capua, whose school produced the revolt of Spartacus and, a generation later, the prestigious familia Julius Caesar instituted in 49 BC.

Why it matters

Capua ran one of the most important gladiatorial schools of the Roman world, and the ministry's scheda for the amphitheatre credits it with a prestigious gladiatorial familia founded by Julius Caesar in 49 BC. The games here changed history once already: in 73 BC the escape of Spartacus and his fellow trainees set off the great slave war that shook Italy for two years. The museum distils that double legacy into a compact visit on the amphitheatre's own square. Rather than a general museum of antiquity, it is a focused introduction to the ludus — how gladiators were recruited, trained, equipped and remembered — built from finds and replicas tied to this building and its porticoes. The models illuminate the amphitheatre’s surviving remains.

What to notice

The first explains the games themselves: interpretive panels trace the gladiatorial system, and beside them stand copies of the armour found at Pompeii — crested helmets, greaves and shields of the types worn in the arena — while a large scale model shows the Campanian Amphitheatre both in its original form and as a ruin, and a short video closes the loop. The second room is the remarkable one: a reconstructed section of the cavea, rebuilt with its marble decoration so that you can stand at the scale of a spectator. Here the museum keeps the sculptural fragments that survived from the building's porticoes, including busts of the deities that lined them and a second-century relief of the hunt of Meleager and Atalanta, recovered from the vomitoria, the passage ways through which the crowd poured into the seats. The reliefs reflect the tastes of the audience that filled the amphitheatre.

Context and history

The museum is a modern addition to the archaeological circuit, opened beside the amphitheatre to carry the interpretation that a bare ruin cannot. Its narrative starts with Capua's school, the training establishment whose inmates — Gauls, Thracians and others held at the ludus — walked out under Spartacus in 73 BC and defeated Roman armies for two years. After the war the city's appetite for spectacle survived, and it was here that Caesar, the ministry's page records, instituted a new and prestigious gladiatorial familia in 49 BC, reattaching Capua to the top tier of the game. The objects shown are chosen from the amphitheatre's own decorative system: the portico deities, the mythological reliefs and the armour typologies documented in the Campanian cities buried by Vesuvius.