A SMALL CHURCH IN THE COLISEUM

DID YOU KNOW THAT THERE IS A SMALL CHURCH IN THE COLISEUM?

Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg, veduta dell’interno del Colosseo (1815-1816). Thorvaldsen Museum Copenaghen

“But is there really a church in the Amphitheatre?”

It is a question that we hear asked frequently, on our digital channels but also in real life, by visitors who walk the walkways of the monument every day.
Yes, in fact in the Colosseum there is a small church which, in line with the history of the place, is the result of changes and evolutions that have occurred over the centuries. It is today located on the ground floor in the third ambulatory of the north-east sector, i.e. in the north-east area of ​​the Amphitheatre, where warehouses and warehouses alternate in the immediate vicinity of the arena, but that has not always been its position.

It was moved to that place after 1827 but the wall structures which on 26 April 1517, at the time of Pope Leo were granted by the ancient Confraternity of San Salvatore, owner of the property, to the Compagnia del Gonfalone which had been responsible for the construction since 1490 of the sacred representations of the passion and death of Christ in the Colosseum. From 1622, after a restoration witnessed by a marble inscription that we still keep inside today, the chapel was dedicated to the Madonna della Santissima Pietà.

Cappella della Madonna della Santissima Pietà all’interno del Colosseo

We know its appearance thanks to numerous pictorial works that have handed down its memory to us; among these we propose a view that the Danish artist Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg painted between 1815 and 1816.
But how did we come to build a small church in the largest theater building of antiquity? The analysis of written sources allows us to find, starting from the end of the fifteenth century, a progressive transformation of the Colosseum into a devotional place. It is a long journey that will culminate between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century with the hypothesis of redevelopment of the monument with the construction of a large church dedicated to those martyrs who, according to tradition, found their death in the arena.
The project for this sacred building was never realized but numerous graphic projects remain. The chapel of the Madonna della Santissima Pietà, however, is still standing and the Circolo San Pietro, an association that manages various works at the service of the needy, officiates mass there.