October 23, 2018 - This building is just jaw dropping. It is the Basilica of Constantine. (Around 300 AD). It was not a church but essentially a large meeting area to conduct the business of state.
I place myself in the shot so you can get a sense of the scale. Those big hollowed out niches “are on the side”! I am standing on what would have been the marble floor. If you look at the top, you see where the cross beams went over the top to match the other side! The scale is huge. It would have been covered in white gleaming marble and filled with mosaics and brightly colored statues- including a 30 foot tall image of the Emperor.
Of interest , all churches copied this layout and it became the standard for Christian cathedrals and basilicas for centuries.
This is the entire Roman Forum on panorama. It is shot from Palpatine Hill from the remains of Caligula’s Palace.
The entire area was a swamp. Then a sewer was built there and drained the water. Afterwards it was literally the center of the world for almost 1000 years.
When Rome finally fell around 400 AD, the area silted in and became a cow pasture. The buildings were looted and used as a quarry for other buildings.
And then there was the Colosseum on the far end of the Forum. We originally decided not to go. We had seen it on the last trip and the lines are crazy long. But as we were walking back to the Metro at the end of the day we noticed the lines were very short and decided to jump in and have a look.
Rick Steves writes, “Built when the Roman Empire was at its peak in A.D. 80, the Colosseum represents Rome at its grandest. The Flavian Amphitheater (the Colosseum’s real name) was an arena for gladiator contests and public spectacles. When killing became a spectator sport, the Romans wanted to share the fun with as many people as possible, so they stuck two semicircular theaters together to create a freestanding amphitheater, the largest in the empire.
The sheer size of the Colosseum is impressive, even in our era of mega-stadiums. With four oversized stories, it’s 160 feet high, nearly a third of a mile around, and makes an oval-shaped footprint that covers six acres.
Imagine the Colosseum in its glory days. The whole thing was a brilliant white, highlighted with brightly painted trim. Monumental statues of Greek and Roman gods (Zeus, Venus, Hercules), also in bright colors, stood in the arches of the middle two stories. The top of the structure was studded with wooden beams sticking straight up, to hold a canvas awning that shaded the spectators inside. It could accommodate 50,000 fans."
Comments