Stadium Seeks Lions for Showcase Performance

A Modest Proposal for the Colosseum, Italy, and the 21st Century

Let’s get this out of the way. The pay-per-view should be arranged, 50 bucks a pop. Call in Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes (he’s out of jail now, right?), we need our best demolition men on the job: it’s time to blow up the Colosseum.

Rome is a magnificent city. After collapsing into ruins with the fall of the Empire, after being plundered by various popes, armies, cardinals and her own citizens, after building some of the finest examples of Renaissance and Baroque architecture that are to be found, the city today stands as a blend of ancient and modern that is a wonderful testament of disjointed and oftentimes unintentional city planning.

Of course, the city is not perfect, nor even close to it. Italy, as a country, shows such a great number of flaws due to ineffective and/or blatantly criminal governance that it is difficult to find any city today that is truly thriving, whose citizens are happy with the direction of things.

But even more so than the specific instances of bad decision-making and the like that from World War II onward could fill a book the size of…oh, I don’t know, let’s say the U.S. Tax Code, there is a more pernicious aspect to life in Italy and Rome. It is an exploitation of the past that seeks to guarantee the stasis of the present. Monuments and cultural heritage, from Ancient Rome onward, are viewed as a means by which Italy can survive, never moving beyond that history to produce something in the future, but rather only by squeezing every last little euro from the work performed by past generations.

Now, at this point, an apologist could point to the many things that Italy does, in fact, produce that are forward-looking: Italian cars, from Fiat to Ferrari, industrial design and fashion (both largely predicated on the continual killing of the past), even alternative energy has a strong foothold in Italy as a site of innovation. But these areas are eclipsed by the importance, in sheer numbers, of the tourism market that is not based on new forms of tourism but rather on a continual re-presentation of the past: Venice, the Cathedral in Milan, the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, St. Peter’s and, yes, the Colosseum in Rome. They are also eclipsed in terms of attitude: today’s Italian generally does not feel authorized to try something new, but instead is stuck within an attitude of preservation that goes beyond buildings and into the country’s soul.

This being said, there is a value to the past. I see the past as necessary for understanding not only what happened, but how we can move forward. I am not against preservation efforts, and believe that the great Renaissance painter Raphael did the world an enormous service by working with Pope Leo X to conserve, amongst other monuments, the Colosseum, which by the 16th century had functioned as a stone quarry for centuries.

I am against, however, the mentality that worships what was accomplished over what can yet be accomplished. This is a mentality that pushes toward a hyper-conservative stance, blinded to our inability to stop time and pushing back against any and all innovation. It is a mentality whose end result is waking up one day, looking around, and wondering, “Where did everyone go, and what the hell am I supposed to do with all of these bricks?”

So, let’s come back to the point. The Colosseum, more so than perhaps any other monument, stands as a symbol of what was. Actually, strike that. It stands as a photo opportunity, so that tourists can say “I was there. See? This is me in the photo, that’s how you know I was there.”

It used to be that photo-tourism was necessary. Travel was difficult and restricted, and photography was a precious commodity. Today, between cheap and efficient air travel, digital cameras, and the internet, neither of these are true.* You can see a far better picture of the Colosseum through Google Image search than you could ever take yourself. You are one of millions to take that photo this year — is that worth the thousands of dollars that you spent?

Of course not. You spent that money in order to have an experience, but what, exactly, is the experience? Does your seeing the Colosseum spark a conversation about what it was? Do you go read books about what went on there, and how the panem et circenses attitude was damaging to the Roman Empire? Do you engage with someone who was born and raised in Rome, seeking to find out what it is about this particular monument that still fascinates even after seeing it everyday?

Of course not. You move on, because the bus is here to take you over to the Vatican, where the entire process is repeated. Tomorrow you’ll head to the Amalfi Coast, swim in the Mediterranean a bit, and remark about how ridiculous it is that Italian shops are closed from 1:00pm-4:00pm. The Colosseum is held only on that little SD card, eventually filtered and posted to Facebook, “liked” six times and then passed over for the next album, the next status update, the next friend.

So here it is, a modest proposal for the 21st century, built on the idea that the Colosseum has served its fantastic purpose, and is now only a symbolic block, for Italy as well as the world in general, against moving into a better future: hire architects to design a new structure, pick a date, call the demolition experts, sell the pay-per-view tickets (this alone could easily generate a billion dollars and be the most-watched programming since the M.A.S.H. finale — NBC would be eating its heart out in envy), and let’s light this candle. We’re talking prime real estate in the heart of one of the world’s most important cities: the international competition of what to build would alone be worth the ideas that would emerge. This is the way to turn a dead piece of real estate into a center of debate, thought and culture. This is the way to bring the world back to life.

What could be expected in the aftermath? The impact on Italy’s tourism market could only be positive. Rome specifically and Italy in general have more than enough relics to sustain the needs of photo-tourism, and if anything even more people would flock to the city to see the impact of such an audacious project. The larger importance, however, would be as a massive push for Italy, Europe and the world to rethink its relationship to the past and the future. It would affirm that the world continues to move forward, no matter our attempts to slow it down. Better to take action into our own hands, and form it in ways that we choose, than to give ourselves up to the inevitable. Time is only either destructive or constructive: it is never still, and it does not allow for stasis.

And after all, the Colosseum was erected in order to showcase destruction: what better way to honor its own history?

*Before I’m accused of believing that everyone can travel to Europe, I know that this isn’t true. I am not blind to economic realities and I know that a European trip is still a very privileged possibility. However, the number of people who can and do take this trip is, as a percentage, far higher than at any other time in human history.