El Djem Amphitheatre

El Djem is a modest market town in the Sahel region of Tunisia, between Sousse and Sfax, and its existence as a prosperous agricultural centre today is secondary to what lies at its heart: a Roman amphitheatre of staggering scale, carved from local limestone, whose elliptical bulk rises above the flat rooftops and can be seen from the main road long before you arrive.

The amphitheatre was built in the third century CE, probably under the Severan dynasty or shortly after, when the town — then called Thysdrs — was a major producer of olive oil and one of the wealthiest cities in Roman Africa, wealthy enough to commission an arena rival in size to the Colosseum in Rome.

The seating tiers originally rose in three levels supported by a massive radial and annular vault system, and the cavea could hold between thirty and thirty-five thousand spectators who came to watch gladiatorial combats and wild beast hunts; the sand-covered arena floor visible today is only a partial reconstruction, and the original substructure of cages, tunnels and mechanisms beneath the arena has been largely filled in for safety.

What makes El Djem extraordinary compared to other provincial Roman amphitheatres is the survival of the exterior wall in near-continuous elevation on the north and east sides: four storeys of arched openings and engaged columns in the Corinthian order, standing roughly twenty metres high, giving an unmatched impression of the outer shell of a Roman entertainment building.

The amphitheatre was later used as a quarry for building material, which damaged the structure but also preserved it from complete demolition; the damaged south side, where stones were removed, now reads as a wound through the facade that adds to the sense of violence in the building's history.

The El Djem Museum, adjacent to the amphitheatre, holds a fine collection of Roman mosaics recovered from the region — Thysdrs was famous for its mosaic workshops — including several in situ floors and panels depicting gladiatorial scenes, chariot races and mythological subjects that give a vivid sense of the daily life of the elite who funded the arena.

In 2016 a section of the underground passages was opened to visitors for the first time, revealing some of the vaulted corridors through which beasts and gladiators were brought into the arena, lit with dramatic floodlighting that emphasises the scale of the Roman engineering.

The third century construction date places the amphitheatre in the period of the Severan dynasty's greatest territorial expansion, when the wealth flowing from North African agriculture funded a building programme of imperial scale in the provinces.

The El Djem Amphitheatre is one of the three largest surviving amphitheatres in the Roman world, comparable in scale to the Colosseum and the arena at Capua, and its north exterior wall stands in remarkable completeness.

The adjacent museum houses one of Tunisia's finest mosaic collections, giving context to the prosperity of Roman Thysdrs.

The 2016 opening of the underground passages offers a genuine new dimension to the visit that was previously unavailable.