Old Man in Need

"When the Colosseum falls, Rome will fall; when Rome falls, so will the world." So said the Venerable Bede in awe 1,200 years ago, at the 1st century's most famed amphitheater. The Colosseum, though battered by earthquakes and ruthlessly despoiled by late Renaissance builders who stole its facing stones for the Farnese, Barberini and Venezia palaces, has long been an image of megalithic permanence. Not any more. Last week Roman authorities took the extraordinary step of closing the Colosseum to visitors indefinitely.

The danger is falling masonry. Since March, more than 30 pieces of stone --most weighing around 40 Ibs.--have tumbled, dislodged by weed roots or weakened by the vibrations from the 200,000 vehicles that thunder round the Colosseum each day and the subway trains that pass under its foundations at ten-minute intervals. "The Colosseum is not falling down," insisted one custodian last week. "It's just an old, old man who needs medical treatment."

But who pays the doctor? Such was the damage to the Colosseum and the nearby Forum in last month's swamping rains that Gian Filippo Carettoni, Rome's superintendent of antiquities, estimates cost of the immediate restoration of the Colosseum at $430,000 and, of the crumbling walls and underpinning of the Forum, another $4,000,000. But Rome has the highest municipal debt in Italy, around $3 billion: it is in effect bankrupt. And the deterioration of antica Roma is only one in a series of revelations of decay in Italy's most famous monuments that have popped up, like Banquo's ghost, to alarm conservationists this summer.

Milan's 600-year-old cathedral is in danger of collapse, and visitors are banned from the apse and roof. The four main pillars supporting the dome --each weighing 3,800 tons--have sunk almost an inch in the past three years, breaking two of the four tie beams between them. The mayor of Milan admitted that "the situation is not dramatic, though it is worrying." He has banned motor traffic from the huge and busy square in front of the cathedral, in effect closing the crossroads of the central city. The result has been the worst traffic snarls in Milanese memory.

In Venice, according to Professor Pasquale Rotondi, head of Italy's national restoration center, the famed bronze horses on the fac,ade of St. Mark's must be removed to an atmosphere-controlled room in the Marciana Library, "before the season of lagoon fogs" begins in late fall. Their bronze is now too corroded by pollution to remain outside. The same measures, Rotondi insists, are needed to preserve the so-called Doors of Paradise that Ghiberti made for Florence's Baptistery.

Italy and the Forum in particular are becoming a conservationist's nightmare. "It's no longer a matter of patching up this or that situation," said Minister Rodolfo Siviero. "It's a general collapse."

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