The archæology of Rome, Part 7 : $b The Flavian amphitheatre, commonly called the ColosseumParker, John Henry
History
The archæology of Rome, Part 7 : $b The Flavian amphitheatre, commonly called the Colosseum
Parker, John Henry
Rome -- Antiquities
conveyed in this _specus_ originally must have been one of those that
passed over the short _agger_ of Servius Tullius from the Cœlian to the
Aventine, found in the excavation of 1868, and traced also in 1876 in the
cave under S. Sabba, by the side of the Aqua Appia, in the same tunnel,
but in a terra-cotta pipe, not in the stone _specus_. The third branch,
in the direction of the Colosseum, may still be in use, though so deep as
to be unknown, supplying wells only, and this may be the one tapped by
the workmen employed by Signor Rosa, and which now floods the Colosseum,
and S. Clement’s also. The only outlet from a large reservoir, in which
the water is always three feet deep, must afford a very abundant supply
of water, and the account given by the workmen who made this branch of
it agrees with this. They say it was a steady constant stream of water,
and it did not gush out of the earth in the manner that a natural spring
does; the spring must therefore be at some distance. If this view is
correct, it would be comparatively easy to turn the stream into a drain
under the Clivus Scauri, and into the one made by the Municipality about
1865, under the road near the church of S. Gregory, between the Cœlian
and the Palatine, and to carry it in that manner to the Tiber.
It is however probable that this spring alone, which was only a
subsidiary spring to the Appian aqueduct, is not sufficiently abundant
to supply the quantity of water, which now rises to the height of about
ten feet, or quite three metres, in the substructures of the Colosseum.
There is another spring, or perhaps more than one, in the ancient stone
quarry under the garden of the monks of SS. John and Paul, on the other
side of the Clivus Scauri, on the site of the Claudium, or that square
part of the Cœlian Hill which is nearest to the Colosseum. This site is
marked on an old plan of Rome, of the sixteenth century, as a reservoir
of water, and there are no less than ten wells that descend into this
old stone quarry. In the eighteenth century, and down to the middle of
the nineteenth, this was called a _vivarium_, and was supposed to be the
place where the wild animals were kept for exhibitions in the Colosseum,
but there is no visible communication from one to the other. A plan of
the old quarry, which was made for this work some years since, shews that
this was not a _vivarium_. There are three ponds, but perhaps only one
spring of water in it, and if the outlet for this water was stopped, the
whole of the quarry, or caves as they are called, would soon be full of
water. It seems probable that this is the place from which the greater
part of the water comes that floods both the Colosseum and the cave of
Mithras, nearly under the church of S. Clement. It seems also quite
practicable to remove the water by an iron pipe into the drain under
the road between the Cœlian and the Palatine, made by the Municipality
about 1866. The level of the quarry is eight metres above that of the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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