Discover the Arena di Verona

The Arena di Verona is a Roman amphitheatre built in the first half of the first century A.D. and still in use for performances — the only Roman amphitheatre never to have fallen out of service. Its elliptical structure stood just outside the Roman city walls and could once hold some 30,000 spectators; a modern audience of about 22,000 sits on the same tiers under today’s safety limits.

Only the four-arch section known as the Ala, or Wing, survives from the monumental outer ring. What a visitor sees from Piazza Bra is therefore the second ring, the wall the outer facade once concealed, exposed by the earthquake of 1117 and by centuries of the fallen stone being carted away for building.

The Arena now serves two distinct roles: an archaeological monument open for daytime visits, and a major open-air venue whose opera tradition began with Verdi’s Aida in 1913. In 2026 it hosted the Winter Olympic closing ceremony and the Winter Paralympic opening ceremony.

The Arena is a Roman amphitheater built from pink and white local limestone, sometimes called Veronese marble, which gives its stonework a warm, faintly rosy tone in direct sunlight. Its original design followed the same three-tiered arcaded exterior as the Colosseum, though at a smaller scale -- roughly two-thirds the length of Rome's amphitheater. After the 1117 earthquake destroyed most of that outer ring, only the four-arch fragment known as l'Ala remains standing as a reminder of the original outer facade.

The inner structure survived far better: 44 tiers of stone steps still circle the arena floor in an unbroken ellipse, largely as the Romans built them. That inner seating bowl is what makes the amphitheater usable today, giving tens of thousands of visitors a clear sightline to the stage from almost any tier.

Three rings, of which you mostly see the second. The amphitheatre was built as concentric rings of arcaded piers carrying the seating on radial vaults. The outer ring, in white and pink limestone, was the display facade; the earthquake of 1117 took nearly all of it, leaving four arches — the Ala. What faces Piazza Bra today is the second ring, the structural wall the facade once concealed.

Vaults, not fill. Unlike a theatre cut into a hillside, an amphitheatre on flat ground has to build its own slope. Radial barrel vaults spring from the piers and step upward, carrying the tiers and leaving the passages and stairways underneath — which is why the crowd can enter, climb and disperse through the structure rather than around it.

Local stone, and the reason it survived. The masonry is Valpolicella limestone laid in large blocks. It is hard, it was quarried nearby, and it was worth taking away — which is what happened to the fallen outer ring, carted off through the thirteenth century for building across the city.

The seating is part Roman and part nineteenth-century. The forty-four tiers were consolidated and partly rebuilt from 1805 onward, cut to the same profile as the original. The geometry is unchanged, which is why the acoustics still work: an unamplified voice reaches the top tier because of the shape of the bowl, not because of anything added to it.

Why is only a four-arch fragment of the outer wall left? The rest came down in the 1117 earthquake and was used as building stone. The Ala is what did not fall.

Is it older than the Colosseum? Yes, by roughly forty years — around 30 A.D. against 72 A.D.. The more useful difference is what happened afterwards: the Colosseum was quarried for building stone and became a ruin, while Verona kept repairing this one and never stopped using it.

Is the seating original, and what is it like to sit on? Partly original: the lower tiers are Roman, and much of the upper seating is nineteenth-century restoration cut to the same profile. Either way it is bare stone with no backs and no numbers on the upper gradinata, which is why cushions are rented at the entrance.