The Colosseum’s Second Life

A massive earthquake in 443 CE rattled the Colosseum hard enough to snap iron clamps and send pieces of the upper tiers crashing onto the arena floor. Romans attempted repairs—patchwork, not restoration—but a second quake in 508 CE did more than crack stone. The outer rings buckled and staircases, corridors, and vaults that once funneled tens of thousands safely in and out became unstable choke points.

Animal hunts lingered in the building sporadically, with the last recorded hunt dated to 523 CE. Then, they stopped, as Rome’s money and administrative capacity evaporated.

That’s when the Colosseum began its second life—one that would last far longer than its first. For the next 1,500 years, Romans kept finding uses for it. Just not for entertainment.

A Place for Shelter

By the late sixth century, people were moving into the structure itself. Archaeology shows the vaulted corridors of the lower tiers gradually reused as living spaces and small workshops—not a planned neighborhood, more a practical solution to a city that could no longer maintain its housing stock.

Families settled into the entrance tunnels and arches, treating each arch like a home. Wooden beams were wedged into ancient masonry to create lofts. The open fronts were closed with rough timber, hides, or temporary walls, turning an arch into something that functioned like a front door onto the street.

People cooked where they lived. Soot stains still cling to travertine ceilings—quiet evidence of fires lit to feed residents. Some arches show signs of butchery and textile work, at household-scale production done where people already slept and ate.

Meanwhile, the arena itself began to vanish. Over decades it filled with soil, rubble, and debris, forming a rough interior crossed by informal paths. As aqueduct service deteriorated in the early medieval period—especially after disruptions during the Gothic Wars—residents relied on groundwater instead. Wells were cut down through the arena fill into the underlying layers, sometimes slicing through older Roman substructures on the way to water.

Pockets of Sacred Ground: Cemetery and Chapels

As the city shrank and security worsened, Romans increasingly stayed within defensible areas. That shift changed burial practice. Leaving the safety of the urban core to bury the dead became riskier, and parts of the Colosseum were gradually used as burial ground.

The exact extent is hard to pin down—records are fragmentary—but archaeology confirms burials within sections of the structure. And once a place functions as a cemetery long enough, it starts attracting religious infrastructure, whether grand or modest.

In 847 CE, another massive earthquake caused major collapses along the southern side, effectively “opening” the building. The once-imposing imperial façade became a jagged, accessible stone slope. That physical breach made it easier for small chapels to take root inside the ruin: not cathedrals, but modest worship spaces dedicated to saints and martyrs who could look over the dead.

A small chapel later known as Santa Maria della Pietà was installed in the ground-floor vaults near the arena. By the 15th and 16th centuries, that chapel served as headquarters for the Compagnia del Gonfalone, a powerful religious confraternity. The Colosseum became their stage for Good Friday Passion plays—multi-day events that drew enormous crowds for nearly 50 years. In 1539, Pope Paul III abruptly banned the performances to stop riots that were frequently coming after the performances’ divisive rhetoric.

Even after the plays ended, the “sacred arena” idea stuck. During a 17th century Jubilee year, Pope Clement X declared the Colosseum holy and ordered the exterior arches. In 1749, Pope Benedict XIV went further, consecrating the building as a site tied to Christian martyrdom.

With that consecration, religious association with the Colosseum deepened. The Colosseum became the starting point for the Catholic Good Friday procession—a tradition that continues today.

A Quarry

While people lived and prayed inside the ruins, other Romans treated the building as a quarry.

Earthquakes left enormous piles of fallen stone, and scavenging began almost immediately. In the 8th and 9th centuries, metal scarcity sparked what historians sometimes call an “iron rush.” The Colosseum’s stones were held together with iron and bronze clamps, and locals spent generations chiseling into the walls to extract them for raw material for tools, fittings, and weapons.

Medieval Romans also built kilns inside the Colosseum to burn marble seating and statues into lime for mortar. That’s part of why the interior looks so skeletal today: the “skin” of the building was literally cooked down into glue.

After another major collapse in 1349, the fallen southern wall—nicknamed the cinque dita, the “five fingers”—became a public quarry. For centuries, popes, nobles, and builders treated the Colosseum as a convenient supply depot. Stone from the amphitheater ended up in palaces, churches, hospitals, and monuments across Rome, including Palazzo Barberini and St. Peter’s Basilica. In 1452, a single contractor, Giovanni Foglia from Como, carried off over 2,500 cartloads of Colosseum debris in just nine months.

If you needed stone for a palace, a church, a hospital, or a monument, you knew where to find it. Until 1749, when Benedict XIV’s consecration finally put an end to it.

Landlords, Then Fortresses

By the 10th century, the nearby Church of Santa Maria Nova (today Santa Francesca Romana) had claimed jurisdiction over the Colosseum. But they didn’t turn their new ecclesiastical asset into a place of worship. They turned it into income.

The church subdivided arches into houses and workshops and leased them to residents. Those faint Roman numerals still visible in places—once seating markers for spectators—became something like house numbers in a medieval rental complex.

That arrangement didn’t remain peaceful for long.

In the 11th–13th centuries, Rome’s power shifted toward aristocratic families who fought one another constantly for territory and leverage. Medieval Rome didn’t have a strong central government or a standing police force. Control belonged to whoever could hold defensible structures.

So the Colosseum—massive, high, strategically placed—was irresistible.

The Frangipani family seized it by force, walling up ground-floor arches into a single fortified perimeter. The amphitheater became a castle. Hired soldiers occupied the upper levels as watch posts. The family took the more stable middle tiers. From there, they could monitor movement across the city and control key routes.

Eventually the Church recognized what it couldn’t undo and formalized the occupation through perpetual leases—turning brute fact into legal reality.

In the mid-1200s, the Annibaldi, wealthier and aligned with papal power, pushed the Frangipani out. The takeover was less a heroic siege than a grinding combination of force and paperwork: warfare had bankrupted the Frangipani, and in 1244 the Annibaldi secured major control through purchase of lease rights, then enforced it with private muscle.

In 1312, fed-up Romans and rival factions launched a major assault. By 1332, the Colosseum was declared public space again. And people moved back in—because in Rome, even after all of this, the Colosseum kept returning to the same function: shelter, workspace, and opportunistic reuse.

Housing returned once more, though things looked quite different. First, with the 1349 earthquake, the entire southern wall was gone. Second, the church became more sophisticated in its leases. In addition to individual families renting spaces, guilds rented blocks of arches. Trades clustered together. Ground-floor spaces were prized; the higher you climbed, the poorer the residents became. The very top tiers housed the destitute, living in exposed lean-to shelters.

The End of the “Living Ruin”

In the final centuries before modern preservation, the Colosseum housed an odd mix: saltpeter workers scraping chemicals for gunpowder from damp walls, hermits living in the upper arches, pilgrims passing through sacred ground.

That ended abruptly in the early 1800s.

When Napoleon’s forces occupied Rome, they brought with them a vision of classical aesthetic and an obsession with order. They saw people living inside ruins as a disgrace.

French administrators began systematic evictions. They demolished medieval walls floors, and doorways. Their aim was to eradicate centuries of lived structure in the name of recovering the original arena floor.

This set the stage for future administrative reclamations, restorations, and archaeological preservation, leading to the Colosseum Archaeological Park that can be visited today.