This Colosseum

This Colosseum (also sometimes Coliseum) image was created by me after my holiday to Rome when I wanted to portray the magnificent structure as it might once have looked. It was my first holiday to Italy and we spent a long weekend going round the famous ancient sites. It's an amazing place for tourists, even on visits without much planning because such amazing pieces of history litter the city.I used an existing tourist postcard image as a basis and used various techniques to take other parts that still exist and repeat them around the rest of the shape. It wasn't simply a case of mirroring what was already there becuase so much of the centre of this amazing piece of history was incomplete and it is not a simple matter to wrap the rest of the building around because the perspective can't be easily adapted. The image on the right shows how I roughly mapped out where the majority of the front of the Colosseum was missing, and what I had to fill in as a patchwork of other cloned areas. Most of the arches were copied from the part that was rebuilt at the bottom a couple of centuries ago but this had to be distorted and tinted, with a whole new set of shadows added. After this, large blocks had to placed in the arches on which used to stand an array of impressive statues. The Colosseum was originally called the Flavian Amphitheatre and was the largest of its kind in the Roman Empire. Contruction began in 72AD and was finished in 80AD, and it was used for entertainment such as gladiator combat for about two hundred years. Still up until the 500s it was in use for one thing and another but two earthquakes around that time caused significant structural damage. Another earthquake in 847AD and a fourth in 1349 did most of the rest of the damage however in its state of ruin it was then plundered for marble that was used in the construction of St Peter's Basilica in the 16th century. In 1749 however the abuse was stopped by Pope Benedict XIV and bits of reconstruction were attempted in the centuries after, leading to the very new-looking brighter-coloured brick.Rome is a massively popular tourist destination due to historical features. Some of the most significant and those I visited while having my holiday in Rome were:Ara Pacis, Aurelian Walls Baths of Caracalla, Baths of Diocletian, Bocca della Verità, Castel Sant'Angelo, Catacombs of Rome, Circus Maximus, Forum Romanum, Imperial forums, Colosseum, Curia Hostilia, Cloaca Maxima, Palatine Hill, Pantheon, St. Peter's Basilicas, Torre dei Conti, Torre delle Milizie, Trajan's Column.