Near the middle of the arena, shifted towards the east, a rectangular pit is cut into the tufa, almost five metres deep. Stone blocks with a hook in the centre were found at the bottom: counterweights for a hoist that lifted the animal cages up to arena level. Nothing explains the purpose of the Roman amphitheatre of Larino more plainly.
What to see
The building went up in the last twenty years of the first century, under the terms of the will of one L. Capitone, a man of senatorial rank: a fragmentary inscription once set above the western gate says so. It was inaugurated under Titus, in the years when, after the Flavian amphitheatre, provincial notables were paying for similar buildings in their own towns. Larino's is a middle-sized one, with a major axis of almost 98 metres and a minor axis of 80, but with more than six thousand square metres of ground it could hold nearly eleven thousand spectators: comparable to Luceria or Alba Fucens, far from the scale of Capua.
The construction is a hybrid, and you can see it. The arena and the lowest tiers were cut straight into the sandstone of the slope, while the upper orders were raised in rubble-filled masonry with an outer facing of opus reticulatum. The arena floor is slightly convex, so that water drained into the euripus, the channel running all the way round it. The podium wall, two metres high, was faced with limestone slabs whose rounded top edge acted as a parapet and carried the holes for the netting that shielded the public; behind it open four small rooms, the spoliaria, where wounded gladiators were treated and the bodies of the dead were laid.
Visiting
Ancient authors never mention the monument, and for centuries the argument went nowhere: writing in the eighteenth century, Tria already described it stripped of its stone and believed the arena was circular. Only in 1851 did Ambrogio Caraba survey it as an ellipse, with measurements later confirmed by excavation. Today it sits pressed between the railway and the main road, in an area built up thickly over recent decades. Come knowing that nothing remains of the seating: what you read on the ground is the arena, the podium wall and the four gates, two wide and barrel-vaulted on the long axis, two narrower and stepped on the short one.