Colosseum

The Flavian Amphitheater opened in 80 CE under Emperor Titus. It seated fifty thousand. But Romans did not call it the Flavian Amphitheater for long. Near its entrance stood the Colossus of Nero, a thirty-meter bronze statue of the emperor who had burned and been erased from official memory. The building took its name from the statue beside it, not from anything about its own architecture or purpose.

Vespasian began construction around 70 CE, financing it with spoils from the siege of Jerusalem. The labor was performed in part by Jewish prisoners of war. The building rose on the site of Nero's private lake, a deliberate political statement: where one emperor had hoarded land for himself, the Flavians gave the people a venue. The engineering was extraordinary — a system of underground tunnels, elevators, and trapdoors allowed animals and gladiators to appear as if from nowhere.

The word Colosseum entered medieval Latin and then the vernacular languages of Europe as the building became Rome's most recognizable ruin. By the Middle Ages, the structure had been stripped of its marble cladding, used as a quarry, and partially converted into housing. The Frangipane family fortified one section as a castle in the twelfth century. What tourists photograph today is a skeleton. The original was sheathed in travertine and decorated with statues in every arch.

The Colossus of Nero was melted down or destroyed at some unknown point. No trace of it survives. The building named after it became the most famous structure in Rome, then in Italy, then arguably in the Western world. The name outlived the thing it referred to by nearly two thousand years.