I was recently in Rome and somehow didn’t ask someone this question but it’s something I’ve always been wondering about. At what point did someone say “eh, let’s stop sweeping and just let this giant building in the middle of our city fall to shit” was there maybe a couple hundred year period where people didn’t live there? Was it just not worth it? So many amazing beautiful and important buildings in that city I’m just curious why none had any upkeep or renovation through the millennia?
There are a few posts that explain what happened to the Colosseum:
The bottom line is that the population of Rome collapsed after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Together with the rise of Christianity this meant that the Colosseum as a place of entertainment had lost it's purpose. It was stripped of it's valuable resources, like marbel and iron, in order to construct other, more "modern" buildings.