What happened to the missing half of the Colosseum?

Curious if you could share what your book says about the colosseum? Thanks for this video and keep it up!

Ah yes. The 3am content I wasn’t looking for, but still decided to watch

A stadium today is lucky to be around for 50 years so I guess The Colosseum has done alright.

Visited Rome recently in high tourist season. The crowds entering the Colosseum were huge. Walking up the stone staircases until finally you emerge out into the arena, I had the feeling this must be a taste of what it was like on a day of games 2000 years ago. Incredible to think this stadium still draws these crowds 2 millenia later.

I’m no Rome fanboy but the fact that we are left with this much coliseum after a thousand years of scavenging is a testament to the power of the Romans

I find it amazing that in such a relatively short period of time people could forget what the colosseum's purpose was. Thanks for the informative video.

I was in the US Navy in the 1970s. We were in Naples and one day a guy came on with a big chunk of rock. I asked him what it was. He said it was a piece of the Colosseum. He got it by kicking at a column or something and broke it off. I asked him, "What if everyone did that?" He said, "Who cares?" He was Nick Vitullo from Providence, Rhode Island. There was no shortage of assholes in the navy.

The same thing happened to the pyramids. They used to be covered in better limestone slabs on the outside than the less quality sandstone interior blocks, and people started stealing the outside blocks to make buildings, since they had been already carved with a nice surface. That's why the great Giza pyramid has that different tip from the rest down. It was too hard for people to get the upper stones down from there, and that's why to this day only the top part is the one that looks a little like the original full exterior was.

I've visited the Colosseum multiple times with my grandfather whenever I went to see my grandparents in Italy. The building's incredible history was never talked about in detail. This video has enlightened me greatly on the significance of the Colosseum. I still can't believe that humanity temporarily forgot what it was originally used for in such a short period of time.

Here in England we have a lot of roman roads and baths, the roads are all perfectly straight and the baths are so intricate in design, the fact they made structures like the colosseum without computers and large machinery is absolutely mind blowing

Completely understandable. A stadium in your neighborhood has fallen into disrepair. You need stones. You take the stones.

visiting the colosseum is number one on my bucket list. it's so insane to me that people so many years ago build something so beautiful, albeit for something horrible

The fact that the original use of the coloseum was forgotten so quickly really makes you realise the importance of libraries and preserving information It also makes me incredibly grateful that our ways have changed and that we're preserving these great structuers and that we managed to recover their historical pasts These buildings have witnessed the rise and fall of many empires and countries, they've witnessed the fall of rome and how Latin slowly changed into italian and almost most impressive of all imo, they've witnessed a world before christianity was even a thing. Oh what I would pay to hear these walls talk

The coliseum ruins were known as a vast arboretum full of rare plants since the burrs stuck in the fur of the animals that fought there took root.

I remember the first time I visited Rome. It was only at that point, seeing the scale of Roman engineering, that I truly understood how their Empire prevailed for so long. Photographs and film don't come close to relaying Roman might. If you were a slave, marched down the Via Triumphalis, surely the first thought you had would be "We never had a chance"

When I was in Rome it was explained that much of the Bronze in the Vatican was pillaged from the Colosseum. This was specifically mentioned with regard to St. Peter's Baldachin, but given that that was not constructed until the 17th century, I am a bit sceptical of the claim.

I was at the Castel San Angelo recently in Rome, and was curious why there were a lot of holes all along the inner walls. Thanks for giving me the answer that scavengers were digging out iron in the walls.

Worth noting that it wasn't called the Colosseum to the Romans (at least not until late antiquity), it was the Flavian Amphitheatre. It got the Colosseum name not because it's so big, but because of the colossal statue of Nero outside, long gone.

Visited Rome, there are plaques of people that had died, one said 'I am dead now, you will not get any more rent from me you thieving b d '

What I loved about the Colosseum when I visited it many years ago is that in walking through the inner passageways and up the stairs I was stuck by how much was simply a football stadium. It all looked familiar!