{"id":32015,"date":"2021-12-14T17:17:15","date_gmt":"2021-12-14T17:17:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsblogsnew.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=32015"},"modified":"2021-12-14T17:17:15","modified_gmt":"2021-12-14T17:17:15","slug":"when-the-colosseum-in-rome-became-the-home-of-hundreds-of-exotic-plant-species","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=32015","title":{"rendered":"When the Colosseum in Rome Became the Home of Hundreds of Exotic Plant Species"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Colosseum is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy, and thus one of the most popular tourist attractions in all of Europe. But the nature of its appeal to its many visitors has changed over the centuries.<\/h3>\n
image: By FeaturedPics – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=95579199<\/em><\/h6>\n

<\/p>\n

\u2026 amid its ruins grew \u2018420 species of plant,\u2019 including some rare examples \u2018found nowhere else in Europe\u2026<\/span><\/em><\/h2>\n

Open Culture<\/em> writes:<\/p>\n

The Colosseum is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy, and thus one of the most popular tourist attractions in all of Europe. But the nature of its appeal to its many visitors has changed over the centuries.\u00a0In the\u00a0Atlantic<\/em><\/a>, novelist and podcaster\u00a0Paul Cooper notes<\/a>\u00a0that, \u201cthe belief that Christian martyrs had once been fed to the lions in the arena,\u201d for example, once made it a renowned site of religious pilgrimage. (This \u201cdespite little evidence that Christians were ever actually killed in the arena.\u201d)\u00a0But in that same era, the Colosseum was also a site of botanic pilgrimage: amid its ruins grew \u201c420 species of plant,\u201d including some rare examples \u201cfound nowhere else in Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notable tourists who took note of the Colosseum\u2019s rich plant life include Charles Dickens, who beheld its \u201cwalls and arches overgrown with green,\u201d and\u00a0Percy Bysshe Shelley,<\/a>\u00a0who wrote of how \u201cthe copsewood overshadows you as you wander through its labyrinths, and the wild weeds of this climate of flowers bloom under your feet.\u201d<\/ins><\/ins><\/ins><\/p>\n

Cooper quotes from these writings in\u00a0his\u00a0Atlantic<\/em>\u00a0piece<\/a>, and in an\u00a0associated Twitter thread<\/a>\u00a0also includes plenty of renderings of the Colosseum as it then looked during the 18th and 19th centuries. He even selected images from\u00a0Flora of the Colosseum of Rome, or, Illustrations and descriptions of four hundred and twenty plants growing spontaneously upon the ruins of the Colosseum of Rome<\/em>\u00a0(readable free online at the Internet Archive<\/a>), the 1855 work of a less well-known Englishman named Richard Deakin.<\/p>\n

A botanist, Deakin did the hard work of cataloging those hundreds of plant species growing in the Colosseum back in the 1850s. The intervening 170 or so years have taken their toll on this biodiversity:\u00a0as\u00a0Nature<\/em>\u00a0reported it<\/a>, only 242 of these species were still present in the early 2000s, due in part to \u201ca shift towards species that prefer a warmer, drier climate\u201d and the growth of the surrounding city. In its heyday in the first centuries of the last millennium, the arena lay on the outskirts of Rome, whereas it feels central today. Pay it a visit, and you both will and will not see the Colosseum that Dickens and Shelley did; but then, they never knew it as, say, Titus or Domitian did. In recent years there have been moves to restore and even improve ancient features like\u00a0the retractable floor<\/a>; why not double down on the exotic flora while we\u2019re at it?<\/p>\n

Read more….<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Colosseum is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy, and thus one of the most popular tourist attractions in all of Europe. But the nature of its appeal to its many visitors has changed over the centuries. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sector-newsblog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=32015"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32015\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32017,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32015\/revisions\/32017"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=32015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=32015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=32015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}