THE ENTERTAINMENT DISTRICT

Midway through the 1st century CE the Amphitheatre was built to the north of the Theatre: the two majestic buildings occupied three blocks between the Porta Prætoria and the northeastern corner of the walls overlooked by the Balivi Tower, meaning there was a single district of the town specifically intended for entertainment. Indeed, comedies, pantomimes and farces at the Theatre and gladiatorial games at the Amphitheatre were an unmissable occasion for the community to meet, bond and be entertained. Today the Amphitheatre cannot be visited, although what remains of it, embedded into the Convent of Saint Catherine, can be visited thanks to kindness of the nuns who reside there. This monument has never been studied systematically by archaeologists. The only trial excavations, although not covering all the surface where the building would have stood, were carried out by Carlo Promis who, in Le Antichità di Aosta (Ancient Aosta)(1862); these digs also led to a survey and an initial reconstruction. In 2004 a careful reexamination of of the structures caused the dimensions of the building as proposed by Promis to be revised: while the length of the smaller east-west axis corresponded to what had been measured (73.86m), the measurement on the north-south axis was at least 8 m greater than that obtained previously (94.50m vs the previous estimate of 86.14m), giving a more elongated ellipse. Between 2008 and 2009 archaeological investigations at the Balivi Tower provided traces of the inhabited block which had existed prior to the construction of the Amphitheatre, meaning that the Amphitheatre was in fact built in a phase of construction after the foundation of Aosta, as was also the case for the nearby Theatre. The entertainment district of the city stood here, where the high perimeter walls of the theatre together with the imposing ellipse of the adjacent amphitheatre would have created not only a zone with a specific homogenous function, but also a dramatically spectacular backdrop to anyone arriving in the city from the east.