Where is the Colosseum?: following the image/paper trails of an emblem of Imperial Rome Cecelia Weiss (Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University) Where is the Colosseum?
The answer to this question seems obvious: it is a structure that stands prominently in Rome, in the valley between the Palatine and Esqueline Hills, and here it has stood for nearly two thousand years. A veritable icon for the “Roman past-as-glorious,” for “Roman present-as-tourist destination,” the Colosseum is a prominent feature both on the Roman cityscape and in the contemporary collective imagination. However, since its construction, the Colosseum has been translated in to numerous media (coins, maps, books, photographs, video games, the internet, film and television, etc.). Past treatments have dealt with these media as epiphenomena, as mere representations of an “original.” If, however, we consider media as modes which translate something of the material world, they are thereby able to circulate the world at a distance. If we understand the Colosseum to be distributed through media then the prospect of identifying any one place that it occupies suddenly becomes much more compli
