I finally got around to dumping photos from my digital camera onto my computer and discovered I had stuff in there from our last visit to Saint Raphael in November. One highlight of that visit, for me at least, was a brief stop at a real, honest-to-goodness Roman arène in nearby Fréjus. I still can't get over that I live in a country that has actual Roman ruins in it. The only thing I've seen in New Jersey older than THAT was the time I hiked to the top of a mini-"mountain" near my home town and stood in what is alleged to be a dinosaur footprint (to be fair, it really did look like a dinosaur print).
The arena was built in the 1st century and held between 10,000-12,000 spectators. In those days, Fréjus was called Forum Julii, so you can see how the name must have evolved. They held the usual Roman gladiator games there as well as other public events. In the current times, the amphitheatre has hosted musical concerts, although when we were there, we weren't able to walk up onto the seating areas or down into the center, as they are doing some sort of reconstruction work.
Here's part of the exterior of the arena where some digging has taken place:
A tragic note in the local history actually helped to uncover parts of the arena that had previously been buried underneath tons of earth. In 1959, a dam at Malpasset burst (link in French) sending a flood of water down the valley and across Fréjus all the way to the beach areas. The largest such catastrophe of it's kind in France's history, it swept away or damaged 951 buildings and killed 423 people, including 150 children 21 and under. The dam had been inaugurated just five years earlier.
The arena was probably the only structure to benefit from the disaster. A display shows before and after aerial photos where you can clearly see how much of the arena had been underground, but so much of the earth was swept away with the flood that it did the work of years of archeological digging.
Here's the "after" aerial shot (I guess it didn't occur to me to photograph the "before"):
Before the flood, the arena was mostly buried up to or below that top row of arches, which gives an idea of how violent the flood was when it occurred, that it could move THAT much dirt in one fell swoop:
A memorial exists outside the arena's entrance that commemorates the lives lost.
Other interesting "finds" at the arena include some fragments of masonry:
What I think must have been a watering trough either for horses or even the tigers and lions:
And the passageway used by spectators as the entered the "stadium":
One oddity was this metal plaque of a now-headless bullfighter... clearly added long after the Romans vacated the premises:
