Theatre of Pompey

Stand on Via di Grotta Pinta and look at the buildings around you. The street does not run straight. It bends in a slow, steady arc, and the ochre and rust-coloured walls follow it. Shutters, drainpipes, a scooter parked in the shade... it looks like any quiet lane near Campo de' Fiori. But that curve is not an accident. You are standing inside the outline of a theatre that is more than two thousand years old.

This is the ghost of the Theatre of Pompey. It was the first permanent stone theatre in the city of Rome. It was dedicated in 55 BCE by Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, the general Romans called Pompey the Great. You will not find a grand ruin here, no columns and no ticket gate. The theatre survives in a different way. It lives in the shape of the streets and in the foundations of the houses built on top of it.

To understand why this building mattered, you need to know one strange fact. For a long time, Rome had no permanent theatre at all. Plays were staged on temporary wooden structures that were built for a festival and then taken down. Many senators distrusted permanent theatres. They saw them as places of idleness, even of political danger, where crowds could gather and grow restless. Several earlier attempts to build in stone were blocked.

Pompey found a clever solution. At the top of the seating, he placed a temple dedicated to Venus Victrix, which means Venus the Bringer of Victory. According to the Christian writer Tertullian, writing much later, the seats could then be presented as steps leading up to the shrine. Whether this was a real defence or a later joke, it tells you something about Pompey. He was a soldier, but he also understood how to manage public opinion.

And the scale was enormous. Ancient sources and modern scholars give different estimates for how many people the theatre could hold. All agree it was very large, seating many thousands of spectators in a great semicircle. The curved rows of seats faced a tall stage building. If you imagine that stage behind you to the east, and the seating rising in tiers where these houses now stand, you begin to feel the size of it.

The theatre was only one part of a much larger complex. Behind the stage stretched a vast rectangular portico, a covered colonnade surrounding gardens. Romans could walk here in the shade, among statues and works of art that Pompey had collected. It was a public park, a gallery and a meeting place all at once. The Roman poet Ovid even mentions the portico as a good place to meet a lover.

The opening celebrations were remembered for a long time. Ancient writers, including Cicero and Pliny the Elder, describe games with wild animals, among them elephants. Cicero, who attended, wrote that the crowd felt no joy at the elephant hunt. Instead, people seemed to feel pity for the animals. It is a rare moment where you can hear the reaction of an ancient audience, and it was not the reaction Pompey had hoped for.

Now comes the part of the story that most visitors know, even if they do not know where it happened. At the far end of Pompey's portico stood a hall called the Curia of Pompey. The Senate sometimes met there. And on the Ides of March, in 44 BCE, Julius Caesar walked into that hall and was stabbed to death by a group of senators.

The ancient biographers Plutarch and Suetonius both record that Caesar fell near the statue of Pompey. Pompey had been Caesar's ally, then his rival, and finally his enemy in civil war. He had died in Egypt a few years earlier. So the man who defeated him died at the feet of his image, inside the building Pompey had given to Rome. After the murder, Caesar's adopted heir Augustus moved the statue away, and the hall was closed.

The place where this happened is not here on Via di Grotta Pinta. It lies a short walk to the east, in the sunken square called Largo di Torre Argentina. There, below street level, you can see the remains of four Republican temples. Behind them are the remains of a structure that archaeologists associate with the Curia of Pompey. Today the site is also known for something much gentler. It is home to a sanctuary for the city's stray cats.

Come back to the curve around you. Over the centuries, the theatre fell into ruin, and its stone was taken for other buildings. But its massive concrete foundations were too useful to remove. Medieval and later Romans simply built on top of them. Houses, palaces and churches grew over the old vaults. Some restaurants and hotels in this neighbourhood still have dining rooms or cellars set inside ancient masonry. If you eat nearby, it is worth asking whether you may see the lower rooms.

The theatre also survives on paper and in marble. In the early third century, the Romans carved a huge map of their city on marble slabs, known today as the Severan Marble Plan. Only fragments of it remain, but the Theatre of Pompey is among the buildings recorded. This ancient map, together with the curving streets, helped scholars understand the layout of the complex. So a building that has almost disappeared is still one of the best mapped in ancient Rome.

Before you leave, walk slowly along the arc of the street. Notice how the façades bend, how the ground slopes slightly, how the light falls differently at each end. Then step out toward Campo de' Fiori, with its market stalls and the dark statue in its centre. As you go, remember that you are leaving the seats of an audience that watched elephants, plays and politics. The crowd is gone... but the shape of their theatre is still under your feet.