Stadium of Domitian, the Arena Under Piazza Navona

Check availability before you buy this one. The archaeological area under Piazza Navona is currently closed to the public, with an official notice posted at the entrance in four languages and no reopening date announced. Several ticketing platforms are still listing it. If a date is offered here, confirm with the operator that the site is actually open on it. The booking can be cancelled free of charge up to the day before, which is the only real protection against turning up at a locked door. What is down there, when it is open: the remains of the stadium Domitian built in AD 80, the first permanent masonry arena in Rome for Greek-style athletic competition, which is what agones meant and where the name Navona eventually came from. The piazza above has the shape it has because the buildings sit on the outline of the track, and the curved end of the square is the curved end of the stadium. Domitian founded a set of games to go with it, held every four years for Capitoline Jupiter, with contests in running, wrestling, poetry and music. Roman audiences were used to gladiators and took some persuading about naked Greek athletes. The building held something in the order of thirty thousand people, and it stayed in use long enough for the martyrdom of Saint Agnes to be placed, by tradition, in a brothel beneath its arcades. The church of Sant'Agnese in Agone on the square keeps that memory in its name. The ticket is priority entrance with an audio guide, and the visit takes you along a surviving section of the outer arcade at the level Romans walked on, which is several metres below the level you walk on now. That drop is nineteen centuries of the city rebuilding on its own rubbish, and it is why the way in is a staircase rather than a door. The listing puts the visit at forty minutes, and that is honest rather than mean. What survives is one stretch of travertine and brick piers with the vaulting above them, not a circuit of the arena, so the time goes on looking closely instead of on covering ground. The entrance is at Via di Tor Sanguigna 3, on the north side of the square at the rounded end, and the audio guide is a device handed over at the ticket office with the ticket rather than an app you download in advance. The stadium is part of the historic centre of Rome inscribed by UNESCO. Even with the site shut the piazza above is still readable, and free. Stand at the north end and the two long straight sides and the curve behind you are the track itself, at full size, held in the line of the housefronts.