Arena of Nîmes

Put your hand on the stone. It is cool, pale, and rough, a soft cream limestone worn smooth at the edges by almost two thousand years of hands, rain and wind. Above you, two rows of arches curve away in a great oval. Swifts dart through the upper openings. Somewhere a café chair scrapes on the pavement. And then you look up properly, and the scale of the place settles on you.

This is the Arena of Nîmes, a Roman amphitheatre built around the end of the first century. It belongs to a small family of Roman arenas that still stand almost whole. Many others were quarried away, stone by stone, for houses and churches. This one survived. The reason it survived is one of the strangest stories in southern France, and we will come to it in a moment.

First, the city itself. In Roman times, Nîmes was called Nemausus, named after a local spring and the Celtic god linked to it. Under Augustus, the first Roman emperor, the town became a prosperous colony on the road between Italy and Spain. Veterans settled here. Money flowed in. And a wealthy Roman city of that age wanted the full set of public buildings: temples, baths, walls, gates... and a place for spectacle.

Walk slowly around the outside. The building is an ellipse, roughly 133 metres long and about a hundred metres wide. The façade has two levels of sixty arches each, with a lower attic band running along the top. On the ground floor, flat pilasters frame each arch. On the upper floor, they become engaged columns, half-sunk into the wall. It is a simple, steady rhythm, and it is repeated all the way round.

Look closely at the blocks. Many of them are enormous, and they fit tightly together. The Roman builders used local limestone, cut with great precision, so the weight of the stone holds the structure together. Along the very top, you may notice stone brackets jutting out. These once held wooden masts. From them, sailors stretched a huge canvas awning over the crowd, called a velarium, to give shade in the Provençal summer.

Now, a detail most people walk straight past. Find the main entrance on the north side. Above the arch, two carved bulls' heads push out from the stone, their front legs folded. They are worn but clear. Nobody can say for certain why they were placed there. But today they feel almost prophetic, because bulls still come to this arena — as you will hear.

Inside, the seating rises in steep tiers. Estimates suggest more than twenty thousand people could sit here. Seats were divided by rank. The most important citizens sat closest to the action. Ordinary townspeople sat higher. At the top, furthest from the sand, sat the poorest spectators. The tunnels and stairways beneath your feet were designed to move this crowd in and out quickly, through dozens of separate exits.

What did they come to watch? Gladiator fights, mostly, and hunts with wild animals. In the morning there might be beast shows. Later in the day came the paired gladiator duels that the crowd waited for. These games were often paid for by rich local men who wanted public favour. They were expensive, loud, and violent — and for the people of Nemausus, they were a central part of public life.

Then Rome fell, and here the story turns. In the early Middle Ages, the Visigoths, a Germanic people who ruled this region, turned the arena into a fortress. They blocked the arches and added defences. Later, the amphitheatre became a walled neighbourhood. People built houses inside it, on the seating, in the arcades, against the old walls. There was a chapel. There were streets. Hundreds of people lived their whole lives inside this oval.

That is the surprise. The arena survived because it was useful. A building full of homes is a building that people protect and repair. Stone that might have been carried off for new houses stayed in place, because the new houses were already here. Only in the early nineteenth century did the authorities decide to clear the village out. Over several decades, the houses came down, and the Roman structure appeared again beneath them.

And almost as soon as it was cleared, it found a new life. Since the nineteenth century, the arena has hosted bullfighting, and Nîmes is one of the strongest bullfighting cities in France. Two big festivals, called ferias, fill the town each year: one around Pentecost in late spring, and one at the grape harvest in September. During those weeks, the streets around you fill with music, crowds and bodegas.

Bullfighting is a divisive tradition, and many people in France oppose it. But it is not the only use of the arena. Concerts take place here, with modern stages set up on the sand. There are also historical shows that recreate Roman games, with costumed gladiators and chariots. So the building keeps doing what it was built to do: it gathers a whole city together to watch something happen.

As you leave, notice how close the city presses in. The arena does not stand in an empty park. Cafés line its edges, cars pass beneath its arches, and plane trees throw shade across the square. A short walk away stands the Maison Carrée, an almost perfectly preserved Roman temple. Together, they show how deeply Rome is built into the everyday streets of Nîmes.

Before you go, look once more at the arches. Count a few of them. Each one was cut, lifted and set by people whose names nobody remembers. Then villagers lived in them, children played in them, and crowds still pass through them today. Touch the stone again on your way out. It is still cool. It is still holding.