Piazza dell'Anfiteatro
Elliptical square tracing a Roman amphitheater's footprint, its arches long since quarried into surrounding houses.
This guide to Piazza dell'Anfiteatro in Lucca opens with laborers in 1830 breaking into a tangle of medieval houses and finding a forgotten Roman stadium beneath them. It traces the amphitheater back to the Lucchese knight Quintus Vibius, who poured a fortune into ten years of construction so the city could watch gladiators fight, then follows what happened once Rome fell and the games stopped: a slow scavenging for stone that left only the outer wall's shape behind. Along the way it stops at the site's stranger later lives as a salt warehouse, a gunpowder store, and a prison, always someone's storeroom rather than a stage.
Audio guides are written and narrated by AI.