Inside and Underground Secrets of the Colosseum | Rome Travel Italy

This is amazing. We are now on ground level. We are on the floor level of the Colosseum right now. This is exactly where the gladiators would have fought. So they rebuilt a part of the actual wooden floorboard area here. The Colosseum is huge. Absolutely huge. 48 meters high. Used to be able to sit 73 000 people. Back in the day they used to have festivals and 100 days of games where they would have events every single day all day long. They would start off in the morning with men versus animals hunting events and then at lunchtime they would have executions because that was entertainment for them back in the day and then the afternoon was the main event. The afternoon was men versus men. Gladiators. They would fight right here on this floor where I'm standing right now. Scientists have even found pipelines leading into the Colosseum floor to indicate that they may have actually had flooded the Colosseum floor and actually had naval battles here in the Colosseum. That's pretty amazing having a naval battle right here. I can see it. It is a huge huge area. So the gladiators were actually made up of about three types of people. They were either prisoners of war, slaves or volunteers and they all had their own reasons for actually doing it. The slaves were allowed their freedom after seven years of service. The prisoners of war, I'm not too sure what actually happened with them, but then the volunteers had fame, money and women. So if you look closely, there's actually an underground area here. It used to be covered up with wooden planks and then on top of the wooden planks would be sand and they'd have sand in there because the sand would absorb the blood from the fights really really well. But underneath that was a series of catacombs. They would have trap doors and elevators where they would basically lift up the animals and gladiators to fight. But there was a whole underground area where they would essentially set up their fights and then bring animals up for specific fights etc. So if you look over here, you can see there's a cross over there. The cross indicates where the emperor and caesar used to actually sit. That was his prime position. That was his main spot. We're in the depths of the coliseum now in the catacomb area. This is where the gladiators would set up and the animals and slaves would be kept. This is where all the trap doors and pulleys and elevators were to bring people up to the show floor for the battles. Here we reached the very top tier, the third tier of the coliseum. Looking down on everything. This is where the poor people and the slaves would view the arena. Simply they had the best view.