I think it is hard to appreciate the impression that this place would once have given, back in the days when the stone was fresh and was in some parts overlaid with marble. Also, we are so used to modern buildings which are many orders of magnitude larger than this one that it's hard to appreciate the impact that this would have had on Romans in its day.

Of course the biggest difference in its appearance from the olden days is the way most of the arena floor is no longer there; a small segment of it has been restored, the rest left open to expose the inner workings.

Part of me would like to see it fully restored to how it was back when it opened; the rest of me knows that that's impossible. There is nobody who can give a genuine description of how it was then, and even if we had trustworthy descriptions a restoration would mean that it would be transformed into just a reproduction rather than the actual structures (for the most part) that my fellow Romans walked along.

But one thing did strike me about this; the scale of the people. Yes, this is a big place. But I can make out the people across the far side pretty clearly, at least from the bottom level. That means that I would be able to see the faces of the gladiators (or those who were not wearing helmets), the slaves, and any others who were meeting their fate in the arena.

It may be the first truly grand scale stadium, but life and (less commonly, despite the arena's reputation) death in the arena would be quite an intimate experience.