The Colosseum

Look along the top rim of the Colosseum, a little left of centre, and you can make out three thin wooden crosses. They may be the ones a Carmelite friar, Angelo Paoli, set up there for Pope Clement XI, while the old arena of the gladiators was slowly being claimed as a Christian shrine. In 1750 it was consecrated for the Stations of the Cross. Canaletto also records the ground-floor arches bricked up on Clement's orders, and a Crucifixion painted over the western entrance. He worked from a drawing made on his own visit to Rome in 1719 or 1720, reused decades later, and after long wavering between him and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto, most scholars now accept his hand. The bushes on the stone are true to the time. In 1815 a Roman physician published a list of the plants growing wild in the ruin.