On this day in 1960, the Games of the XVII Olympiad opened in Rome: more than 5,000 athletes from 83 nations, in a city that had waited a long turn for it. Rome had been handed the 1908 Games and had to pass them along to London after Vesuvius erupted in 1906. Fifty-two years is a long stretch in the on-deck circle, teammates, and Rome came to the plate ready!
And what a ballpark. The wrestlers grappled inside the Basilica of Maxentius. The gymnasts worked their routines at the Baths of Caracalla. Imagine chalking your hands in a room the emperors used for a soak. Ancient venues, brand-new records, all in the same seventeen days.
The finish I always come back to is the marathon on 10 September. Abebe Bikila of Ethiopia ran it barefoot, out along the Appian Way in the evening, soldiers holding torches, past the Colosseum and home to the Arch of Constantine in 2:15:16.2, a world best at the time. He had not been the first name on his country's list, and he arrived in Rome with almost no international résumé at all. Then he went out and ran the oldest streets in Europe faster than anyone ever had. That is my favorite kind of box score!
Toby, alongside the ancient rooms there was new work: Pier Luigi Nervi's Palazzetto dello Sport, cast in ribbed concrete and put up fast, its roof still folding like a shell over the seats. Rome built for 1960 the way it always built — with people who knew what a curve wanted to do.
Toby, the gymnasts at the Baths of Caracalla worked under open sky, which is the best set nobody had to build — no flats, no rigging, just brick and evening. Any designer would have wept.