Piazza dell'Anfiteatro

Piazza dell'Anfiteatro is an oval square that only exists because a Roman amphitheatre once stood on the spot, built outside Lucca's original walls in the first or second century CE to seat crowds for games. As the empire declined the amphitheatre fell into ruin and disuse, and over centuries houses were built directly into and over its arched foundations, preserving its oval footprint even as the structure itself vanished from view. In 1830, the architect Lorenzo Nottolini cleared the buildings that had filled the interior, exposing the oval as an open public square while leaving the curved houses standing around its rim, their ground floors still following the rhythm of the old Roman arches. Four narrow passages, once the amphitheatre's entrances, lead in from the surrounding streets, making the square a small, accidental lesson in how a city can erase a monument and still remember its exact shape.