Amphitheatres on Private Properties. Investigating the phenomenon of evergetism on Loca Privata in Roman Italy

The phenomenon of the evergetism is particularly attested in the Roman world. Especially between the end of the 2nd century BC and the beginning of the 1st century BC, the phenomenon of private donation is well known thanks to the presence of many epigraphs attesting that noble and rich people erected public structures with their own money. What is uncommon is the explicit mention of the private property of the terrain where those monuments were built. This information, in fact, belongs to a restricted number of inscriptions. From an economic point of view, the relevance of this information is considerable, considering the expensiveness of some constructions as the buildings for spectacula. Such an indication could shed light on the reasons why a monument was built on an area rather than another. The present paper focus mainly on three Roman cities where amphitheatres are built on private land, highlighting the substantial changes on the urban plan as result of this phenomenon of evergetism.