Description
The Arena di Verona is a Roman amphitheater in the historic center, in Piazza Bra, and one of the best preserved in the world. Built in the 1st century, it could hold about 30,000 spectators. Today, in summer, people still come here for the opera.
The seating is its calling card: stone tiers on several levels, crossed by 64 stairways, that you take in at a glance from the top, all the way down to the circle of the arena in the middle, about 75 meters long. Today, with the stage taking up about a third of the seats, around 22,000 people are counted for the summer shows.
Outside, a fragment of the outer ring remains, the Ala: four arches on three levels, in pink and white stone from the Valpolicella. It was the amphitheater's real monumental facade, and from there you can tell how tall the complete building was.
Above the arches you can still read the Roman numerals of the entrances: there were 72, and those of the Ala run from LXIV to LXVII. Spectators two thousand years ago found their own gate this way, just like with a ticket today.
Beneath the stands run concentric galleries, and under the floor a system of sewers carried water to the Adige. One of them has been explored for about a hundred meters.
The inscriptions tell of the gladiators. Generosus, a retiarius from Alexandria in Egypt, fought twenty-seven times without ever losing and died of natural causes. The retiarius Glaucus entrusted his fate to the goddess Nemesis, and on his tomb he warns passersby: don't trust her too much.
In the Middle Ages the amphitheater lost almost all of its outer ring, dismantled to build the walls or brought down by the earthquake of 1117, but life inside never stopped. Judicial duels were held here, which Dante also attended, and in 1278 nearly 200 Cathar heretics were burned here.
In the following centuries came shops, jousts on horseback, comedies and bull hunts, which Napoleon also watched in 1805. For more than two centuries the statutes obliged the city's prostitutes to live in the outer arches.
In 1913, for the hundredth anniversary of Verdi's birth, Aida was staged. Since then the opera festival has been held every summer, and the Arena has become the largest open-air opera house in the world.
Don't miss
• The Ala.
• The Roman numerals above the arches.
• An opera in summer.
Did you know?
• According to a legend, the Arena was built in one night by devils, who fled at dawn and left the Ala unfinished.
• During the Second World War the Ala was protected with temporary buttresses and reinforced with steel cables between 1953 and 1956.
The seating is its calling card: stone tiers on several levels, crossed by 64 stairways, that you take in at a glance from the top, all the way down to the circle of the arena in the middle, about 75 meters long. Today, with the stage taking up about a third of the seats, around 22,000 people are counted for the summer shows.
Outside, a fragment of the outer ring remains, the Ala: four arches on three levels, in pink and white stone from the Valpolicella. It was the amphitheater's real monumental facade, and from there you can tell how tall the complete building was.
Above the arches you can still read the Roman numerals of the entrances: there were 72, and those of the Ala run from LXIV to LXVII. Spectators two thousand years ago found their own gate this way, just like with a ticket today.
Beneath the stands run concentric galleries, and under the floor a system of sewers carried water to the Adige. One of them has been explored for about a hundred meters.
The inscriptions tell of the gladiators. Generosus, a retiarius from Alexandria in Egypt, fought twenty-seven times without ever losing and died of natural causes. The retiarius Glaucus entrusted his fate to the goddess Nemesis, and on his tomb he warns passersby: don't trust her too much.
In the Middle Ages the amphitheater lost almost all of its outer ring, dismantled to build the walls or brought down by the earthquake of 1117, but life inside never stopped. Judicial duels were held here, which Dante also attended, and in 1278 nearly 200 Cathar heretics were burned here.
In the following centuries came shops, jousts on horseback, comedies and bull hunts, which Napoleon also watched in 1805. For more than two centuries the statutes obliged the city's prostitutes to live in the outer arches.
In 1913, for the hundredth anniversary of Verdi's birth, Aida was staged. Since then the opera festival has been held every summer, and the Arena has become the largest open-air opera house in the world.
Don't miss
• The Ala.
• The Roman numerals above the arches.
• An opera in summer.
Did you know?
• According to a legend, the Arena was built in one night by devils, who fled at dawn and left the Ala unfinished.
• During the Second World War the Ala was protected with temporary buttresses and reinforced with steel cables between 1953 and 1956.