Piazza dell’Anfiteatro — Housing Built Inside a Roman Arena
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
The oval square follows the footprint of Lucca’s Roman amphitheatre. When the arena lost its original function, its masonry became foundation, quarry and structural frame for later buildings.
Houses grew around and into the ancient remains. In the nineteenth century Lorenzo Nottolini regularised the space, clearing the centre and making the inherited oval more deliberately civic.
This is more interesting than a frozen ruin. A building for mass spectacle became part of ordinary domestic and commercial life. Its shape survived precisely because people kept using it.