IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 284

The Flavian Amphitheatre, better known as the Colosseum, was begun in the AD 70s, when Vespasian was emperor. Its site was deliberately chosen. The land had belonged to the private palace of Nero, the emperor whose extravagance had discredited the dynasty before Vespasian's own family took power. Nero had dug an artificial lake in the valley between three of Rome's hills, and it was this lake that was drained to make room for the new building. By placing the largest amphitheatre in the Roman world on ground that one emperor had kept for himself, Vespasian could present his regime as one that returned the city to its citizens.

The structure was on an extraordinary scale. It measures about 189 metres by 156 metres, and its outer wall rises roughly 48 metres, the height of a modern fifteen-storey building. The outer wall was built of travertine, a limestone quarried at Tibur, some 30 kilometres away, and hauled to Rome in blocks that were fastened to one another with iron clamps. Behind this stone facade the builders used tufa, brick and Roman concrete, poured into wooden moulds, for the vaults and corridors that carried the weight of the seating. Eighty entrances pierced the outer ring, seventy-six of them numbered so that spectators could find their way to a particular block of seats. The whole building is thought to have held between 50,000 and 80,000 people, though scholars disagree about the exact capacity.

Spectators did not sit at random. Seating was graded by social rank, with a broad platform nearest the arena reserved for senators, then the equestrian order, then ordinary citizens, and standing room at the top for the poor. The design made this hierarchy visible, since each class entered by its own doorway and climbed a separate staircase. The arena itself was floored with timber, and a vast awning, the velarium, could be spread above the audience on ropes; it is thought that sailors from the imperial fleet were brought in to work it.

The amphitheatre was inaugurated in AD 80, the year after Vespasian's death, by his son Titus. The historian Cassius Dio, writing more than a century later, records that the celebrations lasted a hundred days and that some 9,000 animals were killed. Although his figures may be exaggerated, they convey the ambition behind the games: a display of imperial generosity that no private citizen could match.

Beneath the arena lay a maze of walls, passages and small chambers known as the hypogeum. Much of it was added under Titus's brother Domitian, who succeeded him in AD 81 and wanted a permanent structure to replace the temporary arrangements of the first games. From these chambers animals, cages and pieces of scenery could be raised through trapdoors into the arena by means of ramps and pulleys.

The events staged there were more varied than the popular image suggests. Gladiatorial combat was only one element. There were hunts of wild animals, sometimes of species brought from Africa and the eastern provinces; public executions of condemned criminals, which the authorities regarded as punishment rather than entertainment; and displays of trained animals. Gladiators were mostly slaves, prisoners of war or volunteers who bound themselves by contract, and they fought under rules enforced by referees. Games were paid for by the emperor or by wealthy men seeking office, and admission was free: the audience gave its time, and the sponsor gave everything else.

When the games ended, the building's long decline began. The last recorded shows were held in the sixth century, and after that the amphitheatre was put to other uses: a chapel, workshops, a fortress held by two of Rome's great families. Earthquakes did the greater damage. A severe tremor in 1349 brought down much of the southern outer wall. The fallen stone, like the travertine of the rest of the ruin, was carried away as building material for churches and palaces, including St Peter's. A large quantity of ancient stone was reused in its construction. Iron clamps were cut out of the walls as well, leaving the small holes that still pit the surface.

By the eighteenth century the ruin had become a quarry with a religious function. In 1749 Pope Benedict XIV declared the amphitheatre sacred to the memory of the Christians who, he believed, had died there, and installed the Stations of the Cross around the arena. This did not stop the removal of stone altogether, but it made the building harder to exploit and gave its preservation a moral purpose that no argument about architecture alone could have supplied.

Serious structural work followed in the nineteenth century. A massive brick buttress was built at one end of the surviving outer wall to stop it falling outward, and later the eastern section was rebuilt in brick to show where the missing arcades had stood. The result is a monument that is part ancient ruin, part modern repair, and it has been that way for over a century.

In the twentieth century the hypogeum was cleared of the rubble that had filled it and opened to visitors, which changed how the building is understood: what most people now see first is not the arena but the machinery beneath it. The Colosseum has also become an object of concern in its own right, since millions of visitors each year and the traffic of a modern capital place strains on ancient stone that no emperor could have imagined.

In the north-west of Spain, about a hundred kilometres west of León, a range of red hills rises above a valley of chestnut trees. The slopes are cut by vertical cliffs and pierced by caves and tunnels, and nothing about them looks natural. They are, in fact, the debris of one of the largest mining operations of the ancient world. Las Médulas was a Roman gold mine, and the material torn from the mountains in the search for the metal now forms the landscape itself. The site was added to UNESCO's World Heritage list in 1997.

The Romans reached this part of the Iberian peninsula late. The campaigns that completed the conquest of the north-west were finished in 19 BC, under the emperor Augustus, and the region's mineral wealth was certainly among the prizes that made the fighting worthwhile. The rivers that drain the mountains carried gold in their gravels, and the washing of river sand had probably gone on for centuries before the legions arrived. What the Romans added was organisation, capital and, above all, water on an industrial scale.

The difficulty was that the gold-bearing deposits lay in dry country, while the water needed to work them was in the mountains. Roman engineers therefore built a system of channels that, taken together, ran for more than a hundred kilometres. Water was led from streams high in the hills, carried across valleys on masonry walls and held in reservoirs built at the head of each working, from which it could be released when required. The surveyors had to maintain a very gentle gradient, with a fall of only a few metres per kilometre. Too little fall and the water would not flow; too much and it would scour away the bed of the channel. The remains of these channels, some of them cut as ledges into the hillsides, can still be followed today.

The techniques used at Las Médulas are known in unusual detail because a Roman official wrote about them. Pliny the Elder, who held a financial post in the province in the AD 70s, described gold mining in his Natural History, and among the methods he recorded was one the miners called ruina montium, the wrecking of mountains. It is not certain that Pliny ever visited the mines he described, but he was writing while they were in full production, and his account is detailed enough to be matched against the physical evidence.

As Pliny describes it, the method was simple in principle and terrifying in practice. Miners drove galleries into the hillside, following the gold-bearing gravel, and left pillars of rock to hold up the roof. When a block of ground had been prepared, water from the reservoirs was released into the workings. The sudden weight and pressure of the water burst the pillars, the roof came down, and the whole hillside slumped. The debris was then washed through channels, and the force of the flood carried the loosened earth away. Modern experiments and the traces of the galleries themselves support this account, though the details remain a matter of reconstruction.

The gold itself was recovered by washing the muddy water over sloping troughs lined with coarse vegetation, which trapped the particles of metal while the lighter earth was carried off. The vegetation was then dried and burned, and the ashes searched for gold. The waste, piled up over more than a century of working, formed the red conglomerate that visitors walk across today.

Pliny also gives a figure for production. He states that the mines of the north-west yielded twenty thousand pounds of gold a year, a total so large that historians have argued about it ever since. Some accept it as broadly plausible for the peak of operations; others suspect that it refers to a wider region or that it repeats an official estimate rather than a measured output. No independent record exists to settle the question.

Who did the work is another open question. For a long time it was assumed that the mines were worked by slaves and condemned criminals, partly because Pliny dwells on the dangers of the job. More recent study of the settlements around the mines, and of inscriptions and graves, has suggested a more complicated picture, in which skilled specialists were paid for their knowledge and moved between mining districts. Both slave and free labour may well have been used, and the balance between them probably changed over time.

Mining seems to have declined in the second century and to have largely stopped by the early third, though the reasons are unclear. The richest deposits may have been exhausted, or the organisation that supplied water and labour may have broken down. The site was then left alone. Chestnut trees, planted for their timber and fruit, spread across the slopes in later centuries, and the tunnels became shelters for shepherds. It was this combination of wild ground and worked ground that later visitors found so striking.

Modern research has combined field survey, aerial photography and satellite imagery to trace channels that are invisible from the ground, while excavation has revealed reservoirs and the entrances of galleries. Estimates of the volume of rock shifted at Las Médulas vary widely, and each depends on assumptions that are difficult to test. What is not in doubt is the scale of the ambition: a landscape was rebuilt to extract a metal that was wanted thousands of kilometres away.

Few conservation questions are as awkward as what to do with a historic garden. A ruined abbey can be stabilised and left as it is; its stones will not disappear if no one intervenes. A garden is different. It is composed of plants, and plants grow, age and die. Left alone, a garden does not survive as a garden: it becomes woodland, and the design that gave it meaning disappears within a generation or two. Some kind of intervention is therefore unavoidable, and the only question is what kind.

The case for restoring a garden to its original design rests on the argument that a garden is a work of art. The intention of its maker, on this view, deserves the same respect as the intention of an architect or a painter. The strongest example is Villandry, in the Loire valley. The Spanish-born physician Joachim Carvallo bought the château in 1906 and set about recreating the sixteenth-century parterres, working from old plans and from traces of the earlier layout that survived in the ground and filling the gaps with his own judgement. The result is not a fake but an interpretation, and without Carvallo's work the design would be known only from drawings.

Not every restoration is so well founded. The word 'original' begs a question: which moment counts? Most old gardens are palimpsests, layer upon layer of planting, redesign and neglect. The landscape parks of the eighteenth century, of which Stowe is the best known, were created by sweeping away formal gardens that had stood for a century. To restore the formal garden would be to destroy the landscape park. A restorer who chooses 1750 over 1650 is making a judgement of taste and presenting it as historical accuracy.

There is also the problem of evidence. A garden's structure — its walls, terraces, water and paths — often survives in the ground and can be surveyed. Its planting does not. What grew in a border three hundred years ago may be recorded in a plant list, an inventory or a painting, but such records are incomplete, and the plants themselves have changed. Many varieties bred in the nineteenth century have since been lost, and the species available to a modern restorer are not the ones a seventeenth-century gardener would have known. Reconstruction from documents alone tends to produce something that looks older than it is.

Nature does not wait for these arguments to be settled. In December 1999, storms brought down thousands of mature trees in the park at Versailles. The state had to decide, quickly and at great expense, what to plant in their place. Replanting the same species in the same positions would preserve the design but not the trees; leaving the gaps would preserve nothing at all. Similar choices face every historic garden after every hard winter, and they are made by gardeners, not by philosophers.

Some gardens have been remade from very little. Hidcote in Gloucestershire, laid out from 1907 by Lawrence Johnston, was divided into a series of small compartments, each with its own colour and character; the walls and hedges survive, but much of the planting has had to be renewed. Sissinghurst in Kent, created from 1930 by the writer Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson, is now maintained by the National Trust, which must decide each year how far her planting can be altered and still be hers.

Heligan in Cornwall offers the opposite lesson. Its gardens were abandoned after the First World War and disappeared under brambles and ivy; when they were rediscovered in 1990, those who took them on chose, wherever possible, to repair what survived rather than to invent, and much of what visitors see is original structure, uncovered and mended. Elsewhere, garden archaeology has shown that old beds, paths and ditches often survive beneath lawns, and that the ground itself is the best archive a garden has.

Practical considerations weigh as heavily as philosophical ones. Historic gardens are expensive to maintain: hedges must be cut, borders replanted, glasshouses repaired. The skills required — the pruning of old fruit trees, the propagation of historic varieties — are not widely taught, and the number of trained gardeners has fallen. A restoration that is not matched by an endowment for maintenance is a promise that cannot be kept, and a neglected restored garden is worse than an honest ruin.

Where does this leave the visitor? My own view is that the argument between restoration and preservation is often falsely framed. A garden cannot be preserved; it can only be managed, and management is a form of change. What matters is that the change should be deliberate, recorded and, where possible, reversible. The framework of a garden — its walls, levels, paths and water — should be treated as fixed, because it embodies the designer's intention. The planting within that framework may reasonably be renewed, provided that the choice of plants is documented and can be defended. Where nothing of value was added later, the case for returning to an earlier design is strong; where a later layer has its own quality, it should be kept.

That is not a slogan, and it will not satisfy those who want a single rule. But it has the merit of being honest about what a garden is: not a monument, but a process that someone must keep going.