Italy’s Ministry of Culture Dario Franceschini, unveiled the enormous restoration of the vaults and passageways. Two millennia ago, the hypogea was illuminated by candlelight, but with the arena’s original ground level long ago destroyed, it is visible from the Colosseum’s upper levels, with sunlight filtering down into its depths.
Tourists will be able to walk through the passageways on a wooden platform and admire the corridors and archways which interconnected the hypogea between the rooms where gladiators and animals waited, before entering the elevators which would catapult them onto the arena. Now, for the first in the Colosseum’s 2,000 year history, the extensive underground levels, where gladiators and animals waited before going into battle may be visited. For everyone else, the heart of the structure, the subterranean levels known as the hypogea, have only been opened since 2016 and that represented only a small section.
Chances are if you have been through the underground levels of the Colosseum, you are a well-credentialed archeologist.
