Stadium of Domitian: The Ghost Under Piazza Navona
Why is it significant?
Step out of the northern end of Piazza Navona and peer through the openings below the pavement into a deep trench: travertine arches, brick walls, the stumps of great stairways. That is the Stadium of Domitian... and the elegant oval piazza you just crossed is its ghost.
Key Facts
| Place | Stadium of Domitian: The Ghost Under Piazza Navona |
|---|---|
| Address | Via di Tor Sanguigna 3, 00186 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.90020, 12.47260 |
| Part of Walk | Emperors Underfoot: Augustus and the Buried Campus Martius of Rome |
| Generated | Generated |
Step out of the northern end of Piazza Navona and peer through the openings below the pavement into a deep trench: travertine arches, brick walls, the stumps of great stairways. That is the Stadium of Domitian... and the elegant oval piazza you just crossed is its ghost.
The emperor Domitian built it around 86 AD for Greek-style games: running, wrestling, boxing, the contests the Greeks called the agon. The track ran more than two hundred and fifty metres from end to end, and tens of thousands of spectators sat on its tiers. The piazza keeps the exact shape of the arena, and even its name descends from the stadium: in agone, at the games, slurred over the centuries by Roman tongues into Navona.
Domitian was the son of Vespasian and the younger brother of Titus, a tireless builder and a deeply suspicious ruler. After a great fire in 80 AD swept the Campus Martius, it was largely his workmen who rebuilt it. In 96 he was stabbed to death in his own palace, and the Senate condemned his memory, hacking his name off inscriptions across the empire. His stadium simply carried on without him.
Under the stands ran rows of arches, in Latin fornices, and ancient writers tell us prostitutes worked in arches like these. That is where the word fornication comes from. Christian tradition places the martyrdom of a young girl, Agnes, right here: exposed in the arches, she was covered, the legend says, by her own miraculously growing hair. The church of Sant'Agnese in Agone, on the piazza, stands over the spot.
For centuries Romans simply lived inside the stadium. Houses grew on top of the stands, and the old arena became a market and a festival ground. From the 17th to the 19th century the piazza was even flooded on summer weekends, so that carriages could splash through it, the so-called Lake of Piazza Navona. Now walk south-east through the lanes, toward the back of the Pantheon, to a street named after a doughnut.