Acoustic Competition for the Golden Medal of Crowd Noise Level: Insights on the Stadia and Sport Buildings in Ancient Times

Ancient stadia and circuses were considered by Greeks and Romans to be excellent places for live events. Back in ancient times, many people participated in public entertainment from athletic games, as typical of Greek traditions, to combats between gladiators and wild beasts. Among all of them, the most acclaimed were the horse races conducted with chariots, and this was the main sport of ancient Roman stadia. This paper deals with the digital reconstruction of three stadia belonging to the 2nd century B.C. (i.e., Panathenaic Stadium) and to the 1st century A.D. (i.e., Circus Maximum and Stadium of Domitian). The digital models have been rebuilt based on historical resources and archaeological discoveries to conduct the acoustic simulations and understand the acoustic behavior within these places. After the assessment of the main acoustic parameters, the noise levels from crowds have been predicted in different ways: based on information gathered from historic annals, and the comfort used for modern stadia to predict the ancient conditions with reference to the crowd noise levels measured in modern stadiums. The results indicate that the acoustic response of ancient stadia is very similar to the modern ones, in terms of both reverberation and noise level from crowds.