St. Peter’s Square and the Circus of Nero
Did you know? In imperial times, in Rome, where there is St. Peter’s Square, the Circus of Nero stood.
Nero’s Circus stood in St. Peter’s in the Vatican, before the square and the Basilica were built? Right here, in fact, there was an installation for shows, about half a kilometer long. Chariot races, circus performances, Christian executions (including that of St. Peter’s): these are the events hosted, for the amusement of the emperor.
The circus of Nero was a spectacle plant of ancient Rome 540 meters long and about 100 wide, which stood right in the place where today the basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican is located, in a valley that went from the left side of today’s basilica to almost to get to the Tiber. The Carceres area, from where the chariots left, was located at the point from which the Via del Sant’Uffizio leaves Piazza Pio XII, while that of the curved side can be traced a few tens of meters after the apse of St. Peter’s Basilica.
The work, begun by Caligula and completed by Nero, was built inside the villa of Agrippina Maggiore, a villa that was inherited by Nero on the death of Caligula’s mother.
In the emperor’s private circus, horse, chariot and chariot races were held, very popular in Rome, so much so that on some occasions the emperor, who normally attended only with his court, had the doors of the circus open to the Roman people. It is probable that the plant should not hold more than 20,000 spectators.
Here, perhaps due to the proximity to the adjacent necropolis, some executions of Christians judged guilty of causing the great fire in Rome took place. Nero, according to Tacitus, added mockery to the torture. How to wrap men in animal skins so that they were torn apart by dogs, or nail them to crosses, or set them to the stake as torches, which would illuminate the darkness at the end of the day. Nero had offered his gardens for the show, and had organized circus games there, mingling with the crowd dressed in charioteer or driving a racing chariot.
The circus was abandoned as early as the middle of the 2nd century AD. and the area was subdivided and assigned as a concession to private individuals for the construction of tombs belonging to the necropolis. However, it seems that until 1450 many remains still survived, destroyed with the construction of the new Vatican basilica.
The obelisk, which was placed in the center of the circus spine, was at the behest of Caligula transported here from Heliopolis, where it was located in the Forum Iulii. Here it remained until in 1586 Pope Sixtus V had it moved to the center of St. Peter’s Square.
