Stadium of Domitian site features

The Stadium of Domitian is a brick skeleton buried about 4.50 metres under Piazza Navona, and what you walk into — when the site is open — is not a stadium but the substructures that carried its seating: a low, vaulted, artificially lit series of brick chambers and passages, cool and dry, with the modern square directly overhead.

The brick is the whole material. Walls of small flat Roman bricks, laid in even courses, spring into vaults and run back into darkness; the surfaces are bare now, though the building was originally constructed in brick faced with moulded and coloured stucco, and the facade and the internal pillars of the ambulatory were in travertine.

The plan is only legible from above. The stadium was a building of very elongated rectangular form with one end in the shape of a hemicycle and the other straight and slightly oblique, 275 metres long by 106 wide — proportions you cannot perceive from inside a fragment, but which Piazza Navona traces exactly at street level, its curved north end sitting over the hemicycle.

Its capacity was mid-sized by Roman standards. About 30,000 spectators, against the Colosseum's 50,000 to 60,000.

And right now there is nothing to see at all. The Archaeological Area is closed for restoration works, so the only version of the stadium available is the one traced in the pavement overhead.

The outline of Piazza Navona

The square sits exactly above the stadium, about 4.50 metres up, and keeps its hemicycle at one end and its straight, slightly oblique end at the other.

The substructures

What survives underground: the brickwork that carried the seating.

The dimensions

275 metres by 106, for about 30,000 spectators — the Colosseum held 50,000 to 60,000.

The materials

Brick faced with moulded and coloured stucco; facade and internal ambulatory pillars in travertine.

The Odeon

Built nearby for the purpose of the musical and poetic challenges.

The programme of events

Running, wrestling, boxing, the pankration — in which everything was permitted except biting and scratching — and the pentathlon: discus, javelin, long jump, the stadium race and the wrestling bout.

The emperor's regalia

A purple toga and a golden crown with the effigy of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva.

What victory was worth

Roman citizenship, fiscal privileges or exemption from military service — unlike gladiators and venatores, whose social condition was of the lowest level.