Today, the Colosseum stands bald and bare. But for centuries, it was a wild and overgrown place, and its lost history as a primeval garden ruin has left traces in the art and poetry of countless generations that walked among its stands.

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By the time the artists and painters of the Romantic Age began to turn their interest to the ruins of ancient Rome, the Colosseum had suffered greatly. Since the days of Rome’s flourishing, the great arena had been a cemetery, a quarry of quicklime, a rich family’s fortress, and a bullring. In the 16th century, it was even explored as a site for a wool factory staffed by former sex workers. It had been damaged by fire and struck by earthquakes five times, including one in 1349 that caused the entire outer south side to collapse.

Due to the belief that Christian martyrs had once been fed to the lions in the arena, the Colosseum was also a popular pilgrimage spot. Despite little evidence that Christians were ever actually killed in the arena, in 1749, Pope Benedict XIV endorsed the view that the Colosseum was a sacred site, outlawing the use of its stones in other buildings. By that point, the arena was a crumbling ruin. But it had become the home for a great variety of sumptuous greenery.

Plant life was so abundant in the ruined arena that at certain times in history, peasants had to pay for permission to collect the hay and herbs that grew there. It had become its own miniature landscape, and formed a perfect microclimate for biodiversity: dry and warm on its south side, cool and damp in the north. Pink dianthus grew down in the lower galleries, while white anemones dotted the stands during spring.

When the Italian scholar Poggio Bracciolini visited in 1430, he mourned over the site of the ruins. “This spectacle of the world, how it is fallen!” he exclaimed. “How changed! How defaced! The path of victory is obliterated by vines.” But others saw an alluring beauty in the arena’s greenery. Charles Dickens, in his 1846 Pictures From Italy, talks about his impressions on first seeing the Colosseum, and mentions the plant life there in particular detail, as a natural force reclaiming the site of past glory:

To see it crumbling there, an inch a year; its walls and arches overgrown with green; its corridors open to the day; the long grass growing in its porches; young trees of yesterday, springing up on its ragged parapets, and bearing fruit: chance produce of the seeds dropped there by the birds who build their nests within its chink and crannies; to see its Pit of Fight filled up with earth ... is the most impressive, the most stately, the most solemn, grand, majestic, mournful sight conceivable.

By the 19th century, countless painters and artists had visited the Colosseum and painted vistas of the arena’s overgrown stands and crumbling stones. The Scottish painter William Leighton Leitch (1804–1883) painted the Colosseum as an imposing empty space, a monumental hanging garden reminiscent of Babylon. Joseph Mallord William Turner’s “The Colosseum, Rome, by Moonlight” (1819) shows an almost tropical garden growing in the arena’s shadows:

For Ippolito Caffi, meanwhile, the ruins became an almost nightmarish vision, a primeval jungle ruin where strange lights dance between the stones wreathed in matted vines. The paintings that perhaps most effectively portray the strange, paradoxical atmosphere of the Colosseum in those days are those of Danish painter Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg (1783–1853), who captures the abundant greenery growing in the Colosseum’s stands as well as its lost history as a place of Christian worship, but does so with a faultlessly modern eye, never giving in to the Romantic excesses of some of his forebears. His paintings are by turns infused with a solemn quiet, and full of the life of common people.