Circo Massimo

The Roman chariot-racing circus in the Valle Murcia, the valley between the Palatine and the Aventine, 600 m long by 140 m wide. The archaeological area opens Tuesday to Sunday: from late October to late March 09.30-16.00, last entry 15.00; from late March to late October 09.30-19.00, last entry 18.00. Tickets are sold through Vivaticket and on 060608. Visitors can walk the galleries that led to the cavea and follow the ancient paving past rooms that held shops, inns and small offices. Turismo Roma reads the present garden layout as the plan of the circus: the grassed slope for the terraces, the beaten earth for the track, the long central bed for the spina, with the Domus Augustana on the Palatine above.

History

Under the Tarquins the valley was already used for chariot racing; a masonry circus proper came with Julius Caesar. Racing teams ran under colours, green, blue, red and white, and the crowd divided on the terraces by the colour of their favourites. The space also served triumphs, processions and public executions. An obelisk brought to Rome in 357 stood here and is now at the Lateran. Repeatedly destroyed by fire, the circus was rebuilt almost entirely under Trajan, to which phase most of the visible structures belong. It stayed in use into the first decades of the sixth century, then became farmland, and in the modern period carried gasworks, warehouses, manufactories, workshops and housing until the early 1900s and the passeggiata archeologica.

History

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