Magdalena—

When I was a child, the amphitheater, also known as the Colosseum, was still half-covered by a mound of dirt and vines, buried from an earthquake that my grandmother said destroyed half the town center and set fire to a dozen homes. She was the one that told me about the amphitheater, disguised as a hill most people gave no more than a passing thought to. She spoke of a structure built out of marble, a place dedicated to games of ritual sacrifice for an old religion. I went to the edge of town, found an entrance, and crawled inside. I passed many days in exploration, prodding the carcasses of animals in cages, bones I couldn’t imagine on any living creature. It was evident, even to my most naive eyes, that something of great importance had been forgotten here. While my grandmother cooked dinner, I pressed her about its origins. She made me an offer: she would tell me stories of the lost empire if I took reading lessons from her in the afternoons. That was more than a decade ago. Now, for the last three months, I have returned to the amphitheater every night to discover its secrets before it is gone.

I first noticed your condition in the third month of your pregnancy, just as the Church set about selling marble from the amphitheater. You appeared bloated and lethargic, and by summer, your face and hands had swollen to the point that you could barely see or stand. The physicians blamed the humors in your womb. They prescribed bed rest and prayer. But from my years as a midwife, I know how pregnancy can steal both mother and child. I have watched too many women die from this affliction, knowing that the doctors that lived alongside this amphitheater had herbs and rituals that could have saved them.

The amphitheater was first dug up, at great personal expense, by one of the noble families whose children I had delivered years before. They used the amphitheater as their private castle for nearly a year, until they were unceremoniously kicked out by the Church’s private militia, taken to the town square, and burned at the stake. The townspeople had been required to watch. The daughter’s cheek bubbled and burst across her teeth, and the smell of their skin hung in the air for days. Then the Church took the amphitheater as its private quarry and sold its marble to the highest bidders. They will deconstruct it, piece by piece, until nothing is left. They use it to build new palaces, to build a church to rival Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia. They melt down the iron clamps between the marble, a precious metal today, but something the Romans had in abundance. They want to be sure we worship their god, and the amphitheater is a monument to a time that precedes their rule.

When I turned twelve, my grandmother showed me the books she kept under the floorboards, which documented the feats of the old empire in three volumes: engineering, philosophy, and medicine. When Rome fell, you see—devastated by an earthquake and then, not fifty years later, a flood—the population dwindled from over a million to less than a hundred thousand people. In only a few generations, we lost all knowledge of how to build the aqueducts, the Pantheon, the Colosseum; how to save a woman in childbirth; even how to speak classical Latin. Three hundred years later, our city remains in disarray, and we live in the shadow of our former empire, unable to make sense of the structures and texts they left behind.

The Church is terrified of the feat of the Colosseum especially: it was built out of two hundred and forty arched galleries four stories high, which curve in a perfect ellipse. When the games took place, protection from the sun was provided by large velarium sheets set in intricate patterns. There were countless ropes and pulleys to control these sheets. In the center lies the arena, bounded by a high wall topped with a protective balustrade so the gladiators and animals could not escape. The Romans used to ship these animals from the farthest reaches of their empire, and set beasts loose no one could conceive of seeing today. When last year an artist came through town with a drawing of a creature from a faraway continent—half dragon, half unicorn, with armor-plated skin and scaled legs—the people turned mad for a day, unable to accept that such a creature exists. But in the time of the empire, these things were transported for sport; they knew how to tame and fight them. They mastered animals we understand only as devil’s work.

In my time in the amphitheater, I have come to know it well. The floors have tiered seating: five sections of marble benches, divided by stairs, line the basin. Each section opens onto a vaulted corridor, which connects visitors to the rest of the space. Two marble markers at entrances indicate the section number and the social class permitted to sit there. At the opposite side of the corridors, there pass staircases, which cut through the structure’s massive bones. In the corridors there are the archways, which frame the marble statues of Roman emperors and gods and goddesses. Many of these statues have been sold or stolen as collectors’ items for the noble families, keeping the pagan monuments as trophies in their estates, laughing at the Church for succumbing to its fear of a dead religion.

Better than any of us, the Romans understood death, and enacted this understanding with the amphitheater: funded by the Jewish War, they built it on top of Nero’s Domus Aurea. Nero—the emperor who used the devastation of a city fire to build a private palace, featuring in its central garden a 120-foot bronze statue of himself, as well as a rotating dining room that dropped flower petals from the ceiling. This, from one of Rome’s most mad emperors. He would dress up in animal skins and, for personal entertainment, crawl through the streets howling and attacking people’s genitals. He kicked his pregnant wife to death and then married a man he’d had castrated. His extravagance shocked the Romans, and the Senate declared him an enemy of the state. Rather than face execution—their ritual for criminals was to beat them to death, drag their body through the streets on hooks, display it in the city center for a day, and throw them into the Tiber with no proper burial—he fled with four servants. He made it five miles before horsemen caught up with him, at which point he begged his secretary to stab him in the neck. His last words before he fell to his knees on the autumn leaves were, “What an artist dies in me.”

But I digress. After Nero’s death, the Colosseum became the emperor’s symbol of imperial rule. In the confines of its ellipse they had absolute control over life and death: they killed revolutionaries for sport and granted mercy to fallen gladiators. The ancient records tell that a million animals died in this arena; some beasts vanished from the earth forever. The events in the amphitheater became a demonstration of Rome’s military might and their patronage of the people. It was a civilization that understood public entertainment could maintain social order. Games played out that determined the victor between courage and prowess, civilization and barbarism. It was a site of ritualized violence, bringing stories of faraway wars and Roman might to the city center, to remind the people that the whole world was an arena.

Centuries of ritual death turned the soil rich with iron: an estimated four hundred thousand liters of blood soaked into this ground. The Romans believed that this earth became a gateway to the underworld; the accumulated energy of the deaths that occurred in one place, contained by the circular architecture of the Colosseum, thinned the veil between worlds. Even now, hundreds of years later, no plants grow in its soil. Virgil, the Roman best known for his poetry, is rumored to have practiced necromancy in the amphitheater. A powerful sorcerer and sage, he also created a bronze fly that kept bugs out of Naples and a magical piece of meat that prevented the food around it from spoiling. They say that this was the place he raised his dead parents, that he built a bath out of its stone that cured them of their illnesses. It is whispered that the three of them are still alive in Naples today. My best chance is to recreate something of his methods. This place of death, if properly channeled, can connect us to the gods. I have guided new lives into this world even as others have slipped away; I know, as did the Romans, how life and death are mirrors of each other. I know the gateway in this arena can touch the gods themselves: even the ones that guide women and children through childbirth. When the moon is high enough to illuminate the arena’s floor, at the hour when shadows move against its light, I try, repeatedly, to call upon them. I beg them to intervene.

Once I had her books memorized, my grandmother introduced me to others who studied Roman texts and followed the old religious systems. They met beneath the city, in the remains of Nero’s Domus Aurea, which one of them found by following pathways undiscovered by the Church. Some of them were midwives, but there were also stonecutters, astronomers, physicians, metalworkers. By torchlight, these disciples traded herbs, whispered prayers to gods the Church had declared dead, and shared ancient texts—though most Roman writing remained locked away in collections we couldn’t access without risking denunciation. For years, I brought you with me, Magdalena. You would sit quietly in corners, watching our exchanges with curious eyes. But as you grew older, your curiosity hardened into fear, and over the summer you told me you would not accept me as your midwife, that I practiced witchcraft. But I want nothing more than to help. We have medicines here that could ease your suffering, rituals that might yet save you both.

A few basic facts the Church wants us to believe about the Romans: that their engineering was the result of divine intervention. The dome of the Pantheon, suspended as if by celestial strings, they call—there is that phrase again—devil’s work. They say the indestructible Roman concrete was mixed with blood and sacred eggs and the bronze Colossus of Nero was made through a demonic pact, while the Roman aqueducts were built by giants. Compare these to our crude wooden structures, built out of clay, dung, animal hair, blood, urine—any base material to make the lime bind. The smell on rainy days reminds one of a charnel house; in winter, our walls crack and let in drafts. All while we walk by the remains of those Roman structures: neat, powerful, inimitably symmetrical. Their roads spanned to the edges of the world; their underground libraries were protected with magical seals.

The nobles, in a direct bid against the Church, have declared the fundamental law of Roman virtue: their grasp of classical Latin and its elegant appointments—its perfect grammar, its enigmatic subjunctives, its indefatigable declensions—molded them into superior minds. They believe that our medieval Latin is the root of our corruption, and if we could just relearn its classical form, we could ascend to their higher planes of thought. We could, like the Romans, use our civilized language to civilize our town; harness the sophisticated language for sophisticated literature; put our structured grammar towards superior architectural engineering. Any possible reason for Roman greatness, they say, comes from these linguistic building blocks we have lost. They build new wings on their palaces to store Roman texts they’ve directed their guards to steal out of buildings protected by the Church, and rip out what stone they can from the old monuments. They’re employing scholars to study the old language and expanding their guards to protect their new assets. It is a total inheritance they seek to reclaim, recreating a city in Rome’s image, one that contains all that might be expressed in the grammar of human achievement.

The logic follows thus: perfectly balanced sentences mean balanced thinking. Classical Latin’s precision enables precise thought, which will enable a deeper knowledge of agriculture, engineering, medicine, even the arts. Beautiful language enables beautiful ideas. But beauty, if not tied to something more meaningful, remains bitter and shallow.

The promise of a new order seduces the townsfolk, who are tired of living after the end of civilization. Since the announcement of the nobles, the ancient texts are being sold at the market, while old temples are broken into and their books disappear. Everyone feels a duty to unlock the ancient’s wisdom through grammar and rhetoric. There is a chance, as there never has been, of becoming someone great. But these new converts are blind to the truth before them, carved in every temple stone, written in the bones of mothers and children in ancient graves. The Romans succeeded because their gods demanded precision in all things—in surgery, in architecture, in the gathering of herbs, in the maintenance of waters. Their religion was not, like ours, mere worship. The survival of our mothers in childbirth is half that of the Romans; our Christian prayers do nothing compared to their precise rituals, antiseptic herbs, and trained priestesses. I have seen the surgical tools of Roman doctors, blessed by Asclepius, and viewed the remains of their healing temples. Our so-called scholars chase Latin declensions while Roman wisdom lies moldering in desecrated temples, their medicines and fourteen different healing goddesses forgotten. They seek the city’s redemption in grammar alone, wandering an endless hallway of worthless words, choking on their own eloquence, sacrificing themselves to the abyss of rhetoric while real wisdom lies waiting in plain sight.

Since the time of our grandmothers’ grandmothers, the midwives, still under the control of the Church, have rejected the study of ancient remedies. Our order does not acknowledge birth and death as liminal moments that require precise ritual observance, and we lose countless mothers and infants to perils the Romans could have managed. When babies emerge feet-first, becoming trapped in the birth canal, we have only barbaric choices: attempt to turn them manually, often rupturing the mother’s flesh and drowning both of them in her blood, or dismember the already-dead infant to save her. She often succumbs to fever days later. The first child I failed to deliver: the mother labored for two days with an obstructed birth, carrying a dead child we could not extract. We resorted to cutting it up and pulling it out piece by piece, but the mother died and left behind three young children. I could no longer accept our ignorance. With my grandmother long dead, I returned to the Domus Aurea alone. I bought medical books from their market and worked to decode their knowledge. In all likelihood their secrets can be recovered; if our current medicines are not sufficient, then the multiform temples of Rome must surely contain the extraordinary knowledge that is required, along with the tools and techniques of that medical art. But when once I offered one of their herbs to a woman suffering from dropsy in her third trimester, the Church’s inquisitors came to my door that night. They took these books and burned them, declaring that these “pagan” techniques endangered our souls. Magdalena: I have been banned from your birth, and you refuse to see me before your delivery. The gateway in the amphitheater is all I have left.

Priests denounce the amphitheater as unholy ground, insisting that Roman spectacles were mere barbaric entertainment. From their pulpits they condemn what they call “that devil’s circle, where blood offerings to false idols corrupted souls and invited demons into our world.” How little they comprehend the sacred science of death! Every execution in that oval sanctuary followed precise ritual. Before entering the arena, gladiators anointed themselves with oils of cedar and myrrh, reciting prayers to Mercury to guide their soul should they reach the afterlife. Criminals sentenced to death in the games wore red ochre on their skin, symbolizing rebirth through sacrifice, even for those most deplorable. Each drop of blood spilled was collected in sacred vessels by attendants who measured its volume before returning it to the earth. Then there were the meticulously planned spectacles documented in imperial records: “Neptune’s Reckoning,” where condemned men fought rising waters as sea battles were recreated in the flooded arena; “The Thracian’s Final Glory,” where a single warrior faced seven bears in succession, each representing a celestial wanderer; “Juno’s Choice,” where female prisoners fought while midwives attended pregnant spectators in special sections, believing proximity to such courage would strengthen their unborn children. You see, while the Colosseum witnessed so many forms of death, it permitted not a single meaningless sacrifice. Each death served as calibrated communion between mortals and gods. The old gods recognize every form of death—both the calculated end of a gladiator and the desperate struggle of a breech birth. These sacrifices carry meaning beyond the Church’s understanding. Every death speaks its own language—a sacred tongue that opens doorways between our world and the realm of gods. To destroy the Colosseum is to silence these ancient conversations, to commit blasphemy against knowledge itself. The Romans understood what our priests deny: that death and birth are twin mysteries connected by this divine gateway.

Each day the Church’s workers chip away at the amphitheater while your death moves closer. The civilization we live in is at the edge of extinction: of course they would seek to destroy the one monument that might save us, even though preserving it might mean our salvation. How cruel that the knowledge to save you has already been discovered, used for centuries, then buried beneath the Church’s prayers. In the town’s poorest quarters, I’ve met decaying women who whisper invocations to Lucina before births, who mix herbs by moonlight using recipes half-remembered from grandmothers. They inscribe symbols they cannot read on their floorboards, preserving fragments without understanding. Yet the priests burn medical texts while ordering new tombstones for infants. I am not deluded by grief: our greatest inheritance are these old gods, and they slip away with each stone removed from the amphitheater. And yet. These blood-soaked foundations, these sacred geometries—the structure may fall, but the ground remembers what flowed into it.

This is no empty comfort. Those who imagine the Roman’s extinction assume that some power—the Church, time, human forgetfulness—could erase what was carved into the very foundations of our existence. This is impossible. The priests fail to understand that the Colosseum’s power transcends its physical form. They may scatter its stones, but the energy within them will endure. The mysteries of our future are no longer held in the stars or planets, as the Romans believed, nor in the cross, as the priests insist. Our very bodies are thresholds between worlds. I propose this as the key to understanding our future: the amphitheater is not being destroyed but transformed, its power redistributed throughout our city. If you live, your daughter may walk streets paved with pieces of the Colosseum and touch walls built from its marble. Each generation will rediscover these scattered gateways, reinterpret their meaning, rebuild bridges to ancient wisdom. What the Church believes is destruction is merely redistribution of matter. This cycle of forgetting and remembering is perhaps more sacred than Roman ritual or Christian prayer. In my hours of vigil, I cling to this certainty. The gateways require blood to open. What can a mother offer if not the opening of a gateway for her granddaughter to pass through? I have only one request: give this letter to my granddaughter, so she will understand, one day, why we never met.

Always,

Valentina