We spent an amazing eight days in Rome and Florence this month, listening, learning and exploring about a deep past of culture, civics and life. That being said, business is never far from my mind, as we are always looking to find and embrace best practices to take back with us and continue to learn and grow from what others have done before.
So, with Serie A on a break and no soccer to check out, we looked back into the past and found a few tidbits worth noting.
A street that has my name. No, we didn’t find a Via Favorito…after all, Italian is the feminine Favorita…Favorito is Spanish but how that came about is another story…but we did find a very appropriate street near one of the Vatican schools…Via Propaganda. What a wonderful name for spin doctors everywhere. The irony is the street is named because of the various doctrines and learnings young clergy had to acquire to be able to go out into the world vs. what we think of that word in a politically charged world of today. Still, what a wonderful eight-hundred-year-old street to come by. I may need an office there some day.
Let the Games begin. The learnings of the Colosseum and the Gladiators could go on for days and it certainly is hard to grasp the vastness and the attention to detail that the world’s oldest stadium has still today. A few things stood out, as pointed out by our amazing guide Alfred. While Gladiator brought tons of attention and tourism to Rome, there were over 100 misconceptions in the film that were creative license and not reality. For example, few Gladiators died in the Coliseum and hardly any were slaves. Most were elite soldiers captured in other parts of the Roman world who were injured and returned to fight, sometimes for years, with the goal of winning their freedom. There were also several women who fought. The pully system as to how they were able to get stages to rise and fall in seconds is still being studied by the best of facilities today, along with the levers that brought the roof over most of the stadium. The speed and accuracy of what the Romans were able to do at the Coliseum for over 1,000 years during the games still can’t be replicated today, even with all that we have.
And some of the nuances the 80,000 seat facility had…vendors renting seat cushions…memorabilia and souvenir sales…lots of concessions…printed programs and ticket stubs since you had assigned seats and ample bathroom facilities. All you would have needed was the overhead scoreboard from the Intuit Dome! One regret was I could not find the press box…but I was told there was a holding area for the media who came and covered.
The last piece, something which the UFC or the WWE has not grasped. At one end was “The Death Gate,” the way Gladiators who did die or were injured and could not walk out were taken out and back to be fixed up. The medical area was just off the arena floor, kind of like today’s sideline tent.
What was old is new again.
Stadium Number Two. While on a walking tour we also randomly found another gem, the second oldest stadium in Rome. With 30,000 seats the Stadio Di Domiziano still has one “End zone” intact when it was discovered below the area that is now Piazza Navona. The Stadium of Domitian was dedicated in AD 86, as part of an Imperial building program at the Field of Mars, following the damage or destruction of most of its buildings by fire in AD 79. It was Rome’s first permanent venue for competitive athletics, erected for Domitian’s celebration of the Capitoline Games. The substructures and support frames were made of brick and concrete – a robust, fire-retardant and relatively cheap material – clad in marble. Stylistically, the Stadium facades would have resembled those of the Colosseum; the floor plan was a scaled down version of the Circus Maximus, having a similarly semi-circular end. The arrangement offered a clear view of the track from most seats.
Even better…it was the first stadium in the world with a naming rights deal. As long as Domitian stayed emperor, his name was on the arena, which was used for boxing, wrestling, track and field and other events. One other thing…they came up with the coin flip to start events and found the original coins that were used to determine order, minted by the emperor.
There will be lots more learning when we return to Italy down the road, but for now, a bit of what we picked up was just a small part, but an interesting part, of our journey. Hope you learned a bit as well.
