More than half of the Colosseum's outer wall is missing, and it wasn't bombs or weather. The south side of the Colosseum in Rome stands on soft river silt, so when a strong earthquake struck, most likely in 1349, that side collapsed.

• ✓Protezione Civile, seismic history of the Colosseum
• ✓Siwicki, Art & Object (2023)
• ✓the-colosseum.net, Renaissance: the quarry

More than half of the Colosseum's outer wall is gone. Not bombed. Not worn away. Look at the ground. The south side was built on soft river silt. So when an earthquake hit Rome, most likely in 1349, that side gave way. Suddenly the city had a mountain of ready-cut stone. For centuries, Romans carted it off, block by block. It went into St. Peter's, into papal palaces, even into a river port on the Tiber. By the 1800s, the broken ends were so unstable that engineers propped them up with giant brick buttresses. They're still there, marking exactly where the missing half of the Colosseum used to stand.