Arènes de Lutèce: The Roman Amphitheatre Hidden Behind Rue Monge in Paris

In Paris, in the 5th arrondissement, the oldest monument in the city cannot be seen from the street. The Arènes de Lutèce, a Gallo-Roman amphitheatre of the 1st century AD, are wedged among the buildings of the Latin Quarter: you enter through a discreet entranceway at 49 rue Monge, or from the passage on rue des Arènes and from square Capitan. Those walking along the pavement have no idea that beyond those doors an ellipse of stone tens of metres wide opens up. Many Parisians know it, most tourists do not, and that is enough to keep the place quiet even in high season.

The Roman amphitheatre

The amphitheatre dates from the age of Lutetia, the Roman name for Paris. It could hold up to about 15,000 spectators and combined the function of an arena for spectacles with that of a theatre: the tiered seating wrapped around more than half of the ellipse, with a stage 41 metres long and a podium wall about 2.5 metres high. Beneath the lower terraces there were small rooms, some probably used as cages for animals, and along the front nine niches that must have held statues. After the raids of 275 the stone was dismantled and reused for the city's defences; the site became a cemetery and was finally buried around 1210, after the building of the wall of Philip Augustus. For centuries no visible trace of it remained.

The rediscovery

The rediscovery is bound up with the very street through which you enter today. Between 1860 and 1869, during the opening of rue Monge, the archaeologist Théodore Vaquer brought the remains back to light. Their preservation was not a given: part of them risked disappearing under new buildings and a tram depot. A committee of intellectuals, the Société des Amis des Arènes, rallied to defend it, and among its members was Victor Hugo. A convent was demolished, in 1883 a further third of the site was uncovered, and in 1896 the site reopened as a public square. Further excavations continued, at the end of the First World War, under the anthropologist Jean-Louis Capitan, remembered today in the name of the adjoining square.

What you see today is a compromise between ruin and park. The central arena, of beaten earth and gravel, is surrounded by tiered seating partly reconstructed; the niches of the scenic front and the spaces beneath the stands remain visible. It is not a fenced-off museum: Parisians use it as an everyday space. Almost every fine afternoon people play pétanque on the earth of the arena, youngsters kick a ball around, someone reads on the stone steps, and at lunchtime it is common to see office workers and students with their picnic bags. It is one of the few places where you literally sit on a Roman structure without a ticket or a barrier.

Getting there

To get there, the handiest metro stops are Place Monge (line 7), Cardinal Lemoine (line 10) and Jussieu (lines 7 and 10); the botanical garden of the Jardin des Plantes is a few minutes away on foot. Admission is free and the site is normally open during daylight hours, with times that vary between summer and winter. It is worth looking first for number 49 rue Monge: the entranceway is easy to walk past without noticing, and that is exactly what keeps it so private.