The Colosseum has been standing for 2,000 years.
Not a replica. Not a restoration. The original structure – all 100,000 cubic meters of it – quarried from a hillside outside Rome and assembled without a drop of mortar, held together by 300 tons of iron clamps, and still gleaming in the Italian sun.
And here's what most people don't know about why it's still standing – and who's cutting from that same quarry right now for a church going up in New York City.
The Quarry That Built Western Civilization
Thirty-five kilometers east of Rome, in a town called Tivoli, sits one of the most consequential pieces of real estate on earth.
The Degemar quarry has been operating since before Christ walked the earth.
Workers today – just like Roman slaves 2,000 years ago – blast stone from 30 meters below sea level, carve out slabs weighing 33 tons apiece, and haul them up to street level on flatbed trucks.
The stone is called travertine.
The Romans called it lapis tiburtinus – "stone of Tivoli" – and they built everything with it.
The Colosseum. St. Peter's Basilica. The Trevi Fountain. The colonnade of St. Peter's Square – 284 columns and 88 pillars designed by the great Baroque sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini, who loved the quarry so much he built a home there overlooking the pits.
Bernini's tower still stands at the quarry today, complete with the coop for the homing pigeons he used to send orders back to Rome with precise measurements.
That's not a metaphor for something timeless. That's literally how they communicated with the stone yard in the 1600s, and the infrastructure is still intact.
Why This Stone Outlasts Everything Else
Modern architects and engineers get asked constantly: why don't we build things that last anymore?
Here's your answer.
Travertine is formed in sulfuric springs and underground basins – a geological cocktail of calcium, sulfur, and volcanic minerals compressed over hundreds of thousands of years.
It doesn't just sit on top of the ground. It was born in it.
Vincenzo De Gennaro, who runs the Degemar quarry today, put it plainly: the Colosseum is still standing after two millennia of earthquakes, wars, and weather.
That's the product guarantee.
Marco Ferrero, a civil engineering professor at Rome's La Sapienza University, put it this way: marble speaks in elegant literary Italian, showy and beautiful – but it chips and fades outdoors, while travertine speaks in Roman dialect, plain and tough, built to outlast everything around it.
From Rome to New York City
The family-owned stonecutting firm Mariotti Carlo SpA has spent four generations filling orders from the same quarries that built the ancient world.
Their client list reads like a roll call of monumental ambition: the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Bank of China headquarters in Beijing, the Great Mosque in Algiers.
Right now, on the floor of their Tivoli warehouse, puzzle-cut pieces of travertine are waiting to be shipped to Manhattan's Upper West Side.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – the Mormon church – is rebuilding its temple there, just across Broadway from Lincoln Center and Juilliard, two cultural landmarks that Mariotti also built with stone from these same hills.
Fabrizio Mariotti, who runs the family business today, describes what his stone does that no synthetic material can: it carries the light of Rome with it.
Literally – the way travertine reflects sunlight is a function of its geological composition, those layered strata of ancient calcium and sulfur, and it produces a warmth that architects keep coming back to try and replicate.
They can't.
The World Still Comes to Tivoli
The Degemar quarry isn't running on nostalgia.
Current orders include the new international airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the new headquarters of China's governing party in Shenzhen.
Kingdoms, republics, empires, and churches – for 2,000 years, whoever was building something meant to last came to the same hillside outside Rome to get the stone that would outlive them.
There's a lesson in that for a civilization that builds glass towers with 30-year lifespans and calls it progress.
The Romans knew something we've forgotten: if you want a building to still be standing when your grandchildren's grandchildren are gone, you don't cut corners on what it's made of.
They built the Colosseum to last, and it did.
The quarry that made it possible is still open for business.
Sources:
- Nicole Winfield and Francesca Primavilla, "Strong, Ancient and Still in Demand: The Story of Roman Travertine," Washington Times / Associated Press, February 19, 2026.
- "Travertine Stone at the Getty Center," Getty Center / Academia.edu, January 9, 2025.
- "The Roman Colosseum: Travertine's First Famous Architectural Use," Texas Travertine, July 19, 2023.
- "Why Are There Fossils at the Getty Center?" Getty.edu, January 18, 2022.
- "The Genius Construction of Ancient Rome's Colosseum," Roman-Empire.net, March 7, 2025.
