Discover Roman Amphitheatre of Sutri

Sutri's amphitheatre was not built up out of the ground but cut down into it: the whole ellipse, tiers and all, is hewn from the tuff. It measures about 49 by 40 metres, and is the most striking thing in a town whose ancient remains are its main draw.

This is architecture by subtraction, and the distinction matters. A built amphitheatre is a structural problem: concentric rings of vaulting carrying raked seating, with the outer wall doing the work. Sutri's is an excavation problem instead -- the ellipse, roughly 49 by 40 metres, was marked out on the tuff and the rock was taken away until arena and cavea were left standing as one piece of stone.

The consequences are visible. There are no substructures, because there is nothing to hold up; no arcade, because there is no outer wall; no joints, because there are no blocks. And nothing to salvage: the long afterlife of Roman amphitheatres as quarries, which left most of them half-complete, could not touch a building with no cut stone in it. What a visitor reads here is the full plan.

The same technique runs through the town. The Etruscan necropolis is dozens of tombs cut in the tuff; the Madonna del Parto is a church made out of one of them; the sewers below the southern walls are cut into the cliff. The walls themselves, by contrast, are built -- rectangular blocks of tuff, quarried from the same material the amphitheatre was carved out of.

The hill made the decision. Sutri stands on an imposing tuff rise commanding the Via Cassia, surrounded by ravines, with only a narrow neck on the west connecting it to the country around. That is why it was a fortress, and it is also why the rock was there to carve. Tuff is soft enough to cut and firm enough to stand.

The town was strategic long before the arena. Sutri's origins are very old, probably reaching back to the Bronze Age on the archaeological evidence, and it grew strongly under Etruscan rule as an agricultural and trading centre. As the compulsory passage into Etruria it was taken definitively by Rome in 383 BC, after the fall of Veii. Livy makes it one of the two keys of Etruria, with Nepi the other. The colony was lost in 386 BC, recovered and recolonised about 383, and besieged by the Etruscans in 311-310 BC without falling. Under the triumvirs it received a colony of veterans -- which is the context an amphitheatre belongs to.

Legend supplies two founders and Petrarch supplies a climate report. One tradition credits the foundation to the Pelasgians, an ancient people of eastern navigators; another to Saturn, who appears in the town's arms on horseback holding three ears of wheat. Writing to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna about his first journey to Rome, around 1337, Petrarch called Sutri a seat dear to Ceres and an ancient colony of Saturn, noted the field outside the walls said to be the first in Italy to receive wheat seed, and judged the climate thoroughly healthy -- as far as a short stay allowed him to judge.

And it is still a working arena. The amphitheatre has not been restored into a ruin to be looked at. Fireworks and a torchlight procession are held inside it on the evening of 17 September, the Mercatantia medieval festival runs for three days in the archaeological park in late July, and the Festival Barocco plays concerts here in summer.

Why is this amphitheatre different?

It was cut out of the tuff rather than built. The whole ellipse -- arena and every seating tier -- is carved from the rock of the hill, so there is no masonry anywhere in it.

How big is it?

Elliptical in plan, about 49 by 40 metres.

Why is it so complete?

Because there was nothing to steal. Built amphitheatres were quarried for their cut stone for centuries, which is why most survive as half a building. A monument with no blocks in it could not be taken apart.

Can you go inside?

Yes -- the amphitheatre is the centrepiece of the Parco dell'Antichissima Città di Sutri, seven hectares of archaeological and naturalistic ground at the foot of the town, and it is used for events. Current hours and the ticket are set by the managing body and are not published on any page reachable here, so check locally before travelling.

What is held in the arena?

Fireworks and a torchlight procession on the evening of 17 September, in the week of the patron Santa Dolcissima's feast on 16 September; the Mercatantia medieval festival, Friday to Sunday in the last weeks of July, across the archaeological park; and Festival Barocco concerts in summer.

What else is cut into the rock here?

An Etruscan necropolis of dozens of tombs, the rock-cut church of the Madonna del Parto -- made out of one of those tombs, and read by some scholars as a former Mithraeum -- the catacomb of San Giovenale, and sewers cut into the cliffs below the southern walls.

What did Livy say about Sutri?

That it was one of the two keys of Etruria. Nepi was the other.