If you wish to book a private group tour of Guildhall Art Gallery, please get in touch with the Gallery team, specifying your preferred date/time and party size. Smartify The amphitheatre is 133 m long and 101 m wide. The outer facade is 21 metres high, made up of two levels of arcades and divided into 60 spans. Numerous staircases and five circular galleries provide optimum circulation.

Roman amphitheatres are theatres — large, circular or oval open-air venues with raised seating — built by the ancient Romans. They were used for events such as gladiator combats, venationes (animal slayings) and executions. About 230 Roman amphitheatres have been found across the area of the Roman Empire. Early amphitheatres date from the Republican period, [1] though they became more monumental during the Imperial era. [2] Please note that Guildhall Art Gallery and London's Roman Amphitheatre will be closed on the following dates: The whole place was seething with savage enthusiasm... in the course of the fight some man fell; there was a great roar from the whole mass of spectators...'The third-largest Roman amphitheatre was the Amphitheatre of Capua, with building dimensions of 169.9 × 139.6 meters. It was located in the city of Capua (modern Santa Maria Capua Vetere), Italy. It was erected by Augustus in the first century B.C. and could hold up to 60,000 spectators. [19] It is known as the arena that Spartacus fought in in 73 B.C. [19] The theatre was eventually destroyed by the Vandals in their invasion of Rome in 456 AD. [19] Julia Caesarea [ edit ] In the Imperial era, amphitheatres became an integral part of the Roman urban landscape. As cities vied with each other for preeminence in civic buildings, amphitheatres became ever more monumental in scale and ornamentation. [2] Imperial amphitheatres comfortably accommodated 40,000–60,000 spectators, or up to 100,000 in the largest venues, and were only outdone by the hippodromes in seating capacity. They featured multi-storeyed, arcaded façades and were elaborately decorated with marble and stucco cladding, statues and reliefs, or even partially made of marble. [7]

In the bloody events of the arena, none came more graphic than the one-on-one gladiator fights. Qualities such as courage, fear, technical skill, celebrity, and, of course, life and death itself, engaged audiences like no other entertainment, and no doubt one of the great appeals of gladiator events, as with modern professional sport, was the potential for upsets and underdogs to win the day. Ancient Roman amphitheatres were oval or circular in plan, with seating tiers that surrounded the central performance area, like a modern open-air stadium. In contrast, both ancient Greek and ancient Roman theatres were built in a semicircle, with tiered seating rising on one side of the performance area. The arched entrances both at the arena level and within the cavea are called the vomitoria (Latin "to spew forth"; singular, vomitorium) and were designed to allow rapid dispersal of large crowds.The cavea is traditionally organised in three horizontal sections, corresponding to the social class of the spectators: [4]