The Romans Built some Big Stuff

Traveling throughout Europe I love to see what people have been able to build in times past. Some of the fortresses, palaces, cathedrals, castles, and the like are amazing in scope, size, shape, and details. But I was not ready to see what I did in Rome. Hundreds even thousands of years before most of the other sites were built the Romans were building on a much grander scale. It is absolutely fascinating just how big many of their structures were. Now I didn’t study much in college about construction techniques, and I never paid much attention to how things were built but I was amazed to find that the Roman buildings were mostly brick.

If you watch movies such as Gladiator or the history channel and see the digital recreations of Roman that was you see the immense granite and marble structures. What I didn’t realize is that the stone and marble was just the siding or the facade. In actuality the buildings are made of brick! I don’t know why this came as such a surprise for me when you think about it is one of the most economical ways to build. Cutting enough granite to build say the Colosseum would have been a very expensive proposition and the end result is really the same. And this isn’t the first time I was surprised by such a technique in St. Petersburg the palaces has also been built of brick and then covered in plaster to get the desired look and in England I was surprised to find out that most chapels used a concrete type mix to fill in the walls between cut stone rather than using stone through the entire structure. So it does make sense that the Romans would have used advanced techniques to build brick structures that were then adorned with more precious and luxurious materials.

However the sheer size of the buildings still leaves your jaw dragging on the ground when you walk around the most ancient structures. Again the Colosseum is amazing. While it is not quite as large as a modern stadium it is not the much smaller either. And they built it without steal or concrete! The Roman Forums tower easily 5 stories, the Roman Baths are simply immense two foot ball fields long and 3 stories tall, the Pantheon on has a dome so large I couldn’t fit it into the screen if with a wide angle lens, and so on. While there are many ancient structures that are large in Europe from the times after the Romans and before modern technology none of it is created with such immense and large open spaces. It is nothing short of astounding to see.

The other interesting thing about this construction is it also showed how the pillaged most of the empire in order to make Roman so ornate. Much of the stone and marble was quarried outside of Rome, much of the granite for instance was actually acquired in Egypt. Along with the materials Romans, like the empires to follow, took monuments, statues, and structures from the areas that they ruled. Many of these are used in the building in Roman or set up for display in the grand public squares. However it is oblivious that turnabout is fair play. Because very little of the expense stone is left in the Roman ruins. After the fall of the Roman empire the buildings eventually went into to disrepair and then were plundered themselves for building materials. I would be surprised if a single church in Rome built after the fall of the empire didn’t have marble, granite, or other expensive materials in its structure that had not once been part of one of the grand ruins left today. In fact the Roman baths were considered a quarry themselves for hundreds of years at they were tore apart to build new buildings.