Piazza Anfiteatro

Frommer's Review

Near the north end of Via Fillungo, a series of houses were built during the Middle Ages into the remains of a 1st- or 2nd-century-A.D. Roman amphitheater, which had been used for centuries as a quarry for raw materials to raise the city's churches and palaces. The outline of the stadium was still visible in the 1930s when Duke Ludovico asked local architect Lorenzo Nottolini to rearrange the space and bring out the ancient form better. Nottolini pulled down the few structures that had been built inside the oval, restructured the ground floors of each building, and inserted four tunneled entryways, but he retained the jumbled, medieval look that the differing heights of the tower stumps and houses give the place. Nothing, other than the occasional market and kids playing soccer, interrupts the oval space ringed with lazy cafes and a few shops. The floor of the amphitheater is about 3m (10 ft.) underground, but you can make a circuit of the piazza's outer edge to see the imprint of the stadium's ancient arcade and poke your head into the entrance halls of apartments, a few of which contain interrupted spans of tufa arches and other Roman remnants.

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