Did you that the Colosseum is not the real name of the most famous ancient Roman building?
In fact this name appears only in the middle ages. Once it was already abandoned, like many other important sights in the middle of ancient city centre, people living in Rome and especially those visiting the eternal city couldn’t understand anymore what this huge building used to be. First tourists who were mostly pilgrims getting to Rome saw that enormous structure and saw as well an impressive 30 meters statue of Nero close to it and started writing down on their notes sometimes like this: “I’ve been to Rome, I’ve seen Colossus and I’ve seen the Colosseum (the building of Colossus). In practice people started using kind of an adjective Colosseum / Coliseum because that building was standing close to the impressive sculpture of Nero.
Colossus was a gigantic sculpture made in guilded bronze to decorate the golden house of Nero called in Latin Domus Aurea. Nero built it after one of the most devastating fires of Rome happend in the year 64 CE. That complex of palaces of Nerone was immense occupying an area twice as big as the Vatican city. On a little hill close to the Colosseum there was a vestibule of that villa. To be precise all that hill was just a big atrium, only a small part of the house of Nero. On the hill there was that enormous statue representing the emperor as a God. It was so big and heavy, even if empty inside, when the emperor Hadrian wanted to build a temple on that hill he used 24 elefants to remove the sculpture and to put it closer to the Colosseum. It remained there till the middle ages and reached the third level of it. So because of its colossal size was called Colossus like the famous one on the island of Rhodes.
Thus if we imagine ourselves going back in time and asking an ancient Roman to show us the way to get to the Colosseum no one would have understood us.
At this point the question is how did they call it? They called it Amphitheatre: the Flavian Amphitheatre or simply the New Amphitheatre. The Flavian one since it was built by the three members of Flavian dynasty. The New one just because it was the one constructed in stone after the previously built first permanent Amphitheatre was destroyed by the famous fire of Nero.
What happened instead to the Colossus of Nero? Evidently it was melted down, fused and recycled like almost everything made of bronze people could find in the middle ages. Especially if it was a statue representing a pagan God. By the way there is another curious fact about it. After the forced suicide of Nero they tried to destroy everything concerning him. In fact they started destroying all that magnificent Domus Aurea. However the sculpture was so big and beautiful so to save it they used sort of a Photoshop: melted down the head, changed the face to make it become a neutral statue of God of the Sun like Apollo or Helios with seven beams of light. Like that it could continue standing there not being associated with the hated Nero anymore.
Written by Eviss Alieva
the Colosseum in rome 