Italica

I forgot to write that last week my program took an excursion to Italica, which is an ancient Roman city where the emperor Trajan was born. Most of the ruins are gone and all of the beautiful statues were torn down with the Muslim conquisition of Spain. But what remains is still very interesting. They have one of the largest surviving Roman gladiator arenas, and although the top third of the arena was broken down and used to build the giant Cathedral in Sevilla, what’s left is incredible. It’s bewildering to stand on ground where men fought lions and tigers, and where thousands of men met their violent ends.

Here are a couple pictures of the coliseum and remember that originally it went 1/3^rd higher. Royalty sat the highest, then middle class men, and the women and children were right next to the action. You can see the open floor where trap doors released gladiators and wild animals into the arena.

Here is the holy room where gladiators prayed before they went to fight.

And this is an up-close of the ancient latin agreement that if the gladiators refused to fight, they would be killed.

This is a hallway under the stands and as you can see, this arena and others like it is still the basic model for all modern arenas that we have.

Outside the coliseum, you can walk down old roman streets that in the past were lined with soldiers, and on which the soldiers’ families lived. Italica was the main base for the far western front of the Roman army, with which they conquered the Carthaginians in northern Africa.

Like I said, most of the ruins are gone now, but you can still imagine these walls as the bases for avenues and houses of a large city.

From one of the richest homes, this is a mural floor of “The house of the birds”, which would have been the house of someone of high rank.