Arena di Verona Historical Timeline

The Arena is the third-largest Roman amphitheatre still standing and the only one that never fell out of use. Its outer ring is almost entirely gone — four arches survive, the Ala — so what a visitor queues against is the inner facade the outer wall once concealed. Almost every date below is either damage or the response to it.

Chronology

1. Mid-1st century A.D. Built just outside the city walls, in open ground: there was no room inside the Roman grid. That is why it stands on the edge of Piazza Bra rather than at the centre of the old town, and why the square around it is the largest open space in Verona. It held around 30,000.
2. 69 A.D. Already standing when Vespasian fortified the city — the earliest fixed point for its existence, and the reason the construction date can be narrowed at all.
3. 265 Gallienus rebuilds the walls and adds a new defensive stretch that brings the amphitheatre inside the city. From this point an audience walks out of a Roman monument straight into Verona.
4. 589 A flood of the Adige damages the structure. The river, not war, is the Arena’s oldest recurring threat.
5. 1117 The catastrophic earthquake of 3 January, a year after a first shock in 1116. The outer ring comes down almost entirely; only the four arches of the Ala survive, and everything visible from the square today is the second ring, exposed for the first time.
6. 1172 Fire ravages the city and the Arena’s marble is quarried for rebuilding it. This — not slow decay — is where the fallen outer ring went.
7. 1228 Municipal statutes set out the city’s first formal commitment to maintaining the building. The Arena stops being a quarry and becomes a responsibility.
8. 1568 A restoration is approved in May; plague halts it in 1575, and the municipality fully redeems the Arena in 1586. The stop-start pattern of the next two centuries starts here.
9. 1728 Scipione Maffei publishes the first major scholarly study, and excavation clears 120cm of accumulated earth from the interior over the following year. The floor level a visitor stands on is a product of that digging.
10. 1820 Residents are evicted from the arcades, and forty-two of them are reassigned for storage. The building stops being lived in — for centuries the arches had held workshops and housing.
11. 1913 Aida is the first opera staged in the Arena, launching the festival, which has run every year since except during the wars. The acoustic that makes it work — unamplified voices carrying to the top tier — is a property of the Roman geometry, not of anything added.
12. 1953 The Ala’s five vertical pillars are post-tensioned with steel cables, again in 1956. The most fragile surviving fragment of the outer ring is held up by twentieth-century engineering.
13. 2026 The Winter Olympics close here, and the Winter Paralympics open here — a Roman amphitheatre used for a global ceremony almost two thousand years after it was built.

What survived, and how

The forty-four tiers of pink Valpolicella limestone carry about 22,000 people for the summer season, against an estimated 30,000 in Roman times. The reduction is a modern safety limit rather than a loss of seating.

The arcades spent most of the building’s life in use — workshops, housing, storage — which is a large part of why it survived. A structure somebody needs is a structure somebody maintains, and the 1820 eviction marks the end of that long, unglamorous occupation rather than the start of the Arena’s importance.

• Official website
• Wikipedia