The Cats of the Colosseum: Rome’s Protected Feral Colonies, Explained

Walk past the Colosseum at dusk and you will probably see one: a tabby stretched along a travertine block, ignoring twenty thousand tourists with the confidence of an animal that knows it has legal standing. The cats of the Colosseum are not a charming accident. They are the visible edge of one of the strangest pieces of municipal policy in Europe, a system in which stray cats have a statutory right to stay put, a registered human caretaker, free sterilisation paid by the state, and, at three archaeological sites in Rome, formal recognition as part of the city’s cultural heritage.

That last part is real and dated. In 2001 the Rome city council declared the cats at the Colosseum, the Roman Forum and Largo di Torre Argentina part of the city’s patrimonio bioculturale. The felines got the same conceptual bracket as the stones.

What is in this article

• Why the ruins filled with cats in the first place
• The gattare: Rome’s unofficial cat bureaucracy
• Law 281/1991, the rule that changed everything
• 2001: when the cats of the Colosseum became heritage
• Torre Argentina, a cat shelter on a murder scene
• Does any of it work? Thirty years of data
• How to visit without being the annoying tourist
• FAQ

Why the ruins filled with cats in the first place

Two forces built these colonies, and only one is romantic.

Ancient rubble is excellent cat infrastructure

A collapsed temple platform is, from a cat’s point of view, close to ideal housing. Broken masonry gives dozens of defensible sleeping cavities at different heights, sun-warmed stone holds heat well past sunset, and excavated areas sit below street level, which means fewer dogs, fewer cars, and a clear sightline in every direction. Add the rodents that any dense historic centre generates and you have food, shelter and elevation in one package.

The relationship in Italy was always more practical than devotional. For the version where cats were treated as divine rather than as pest control, see our piece on cats in ancient Egypt, Bastet and the mummy trade.

The unromantic half: abandonment

Through the twentieth century, dumping an unwanted cat or litter at a famous ruin was a common Roman habit. The Colosseum, the Forum and the sunken square at Largo di Torre Argentina all collected animals this way. People told themselves the cats would be fine because somebody always fed them. Somebody usually did, which is exactly why the habit persisted.

Largo di Torre Argentina makes the timeline legible. The square was dug out during the demolition works of the late 1920s and the ruins stood exposed by 1929. Cats moved into the newly opened pit almost immediately, sheltered by the temple columns, and locals started feeding them. The colony has been occupied ever since, which makes it roughly a century old as a feline address.

The gattare: Rome’s unofficial cat bureaucracy

Italian has a word for the person who feeds street cats: gattara, from gatto. The masculine form is gattaro. In English it lands as “cat lady”, which carries a sneer the Italian only partly shares. In Rome the gattara is a recognised civic type, somewhere between eccentric neighbour and unpaid public servant.

From 1929 to 1993 the Torre Argentina cats were kept alive by a relay of these women, handing the job on as they aged out of it. The chain has a documented starting point: in the 1950s the actor Antonio Crast found the old warehouse where the archaeologists of the 1920s had stored their tools, and began feeding the colony from there. The key then passed through Rome’s theatre world.

Anna Magnani, in disguise, with a basket

One of the keyholders was Anna Magnani, the Oscar-winning face of Italian neorealism, who lived near the square. The reported routine is very good: she would go out in the evening with a scarf over her head and a basket of food, trying not to be recognised, to feed feral cats in a hole in the ground. After Magnani’s death the actress Franca Stoppi took over the colony.

No charity, no grant, no board of trustees. A rota of women with shopping bags, keeping a hundred animals alive for six decades because nobody else would.

Law 281/1991, the rule that changed everything for the cats of the Colosseum

In 1991 the Italian Parliament passed Law no. 281 on pet animals and the prevention of stray animals, the first national law aimed at managing urban free-roaming cat colonies without killing them and without moving them. Lazio, the region containing Rome, had already gone that way with Regional Law 63/1988, and refined it afterwards with Regional Law 34/1997.

The core provisions are short and unusually blunt:

• Free-roaming cats have the right to live free and safe in the place where they live. They cannot be removed from their site.
• Neutering is compulsory and free, carried out by the veterinary services of the local health authority, the ASL. Trap, neuter, return is the only legal population control method in Italy.
• Cat caretakers are institutionalised. The gattara went from tolerated nuisance to a role written into law.
• Harming a colony cat is a punishable offence.

What registering a colony actually involves

A colony is not a vibe, it is a filing. A caretaker registers the group with the ASL veterinary service and the municipal animal welfare office, and is formally assigned management of that colony, in some municipalities with an identification card. The municipality helps with food and oversees the census and the sterilisation programme.

The detail most non-Italians find hard to believe: legally, the mayor remains the responsible owner of the colony cats. Every stray cat in Rome is, in a paperwork sense, the mayor’s cat. If your own cat has ever knocked a glass off a table and held eye contact, imagine that scaled to a city of nearly three million people and one elected official. We looked at the psychology behind that move in why cats knock things off tables.

2001: when the cats of the Colosseum became heritage

Ten years after the national law, Rome added a local layer. In 2001 the city council declared the cats living at the Colosseum, the Roman Forum and Largo di Torre Argentina part of the city’s bio-cultural heritage. The framing matters: this is not animal welfare dressed up in nice language, it is a heritage designation, the same argument used to protect a fresco.

The practical consequence, under the wider rules, is that where five or more cats live together in what the regulation calls a natural urban habitat, that group is a colony and it cannot be relocated. Not for a dig, not for a film shoot, not for a tidier photo.

Rome decided that a colony of unowned animals that has occupied a monument for seventy years is part of what the monument is. Bureaucratic thoroughness about odd subjects has form here: the same civilisation left behind product branding and maintenance paperwork on shipwrecks, as we found in the story of the Roman branded caulk called zopissa.

Torre Argentina, a cat shelter on a murder scene

The best-known colony is not at the Colosseum. It is in the sunken square of Largo di Torre Argentina, and its address is one of the most loaded in Roman history.

The square holds four Republican-era temples, labelled A, B, C and D because for a long time nobody could agree which gods they belonged to. The oldest go back to the third century BC. Beside them stood the Curia of Pompey, the hall where the Senate was meeting on 15 March 44 BC when Julius Caesar was stabbed to death.

For centuries that was a literary fact rather than an archaeological one. Then in 2012 a team from the Spanish National Research Council, led by Antonio Monterroso, identified a rectangular concrete structure at the site, roughly three metres wide and over two metres high, built to seal off the spot. Classical sources describe the Curia being closed after the murder on the orders of Augustus. The structure is that condemnation made physical. Cats have been sleeping on it.

From a relay of gattare to an actual shelter

In 1993, Lia Dequel and Silvia Viviani started helping the one woman still running the colony alone, and the operation became the Torre Argentina Cat Sanctuary, formally established the following year. They inherited around 90 cats. The first outside backing came in 1995 from A.I.S.P.A., the Anglo-Italian Society for the Protection of Animals. Dutch animal rescuers built the shelter’s first website in 2000, which is how a hole in the ground in central Rome acquired an international donor base.

The population peaked around 250 and now sits near 150. The sanctuary runs sterilisation, veterinary care, an underground night shelter, adoption at a distance, and long-term housing for disabled and elderly cats that will never be rehomed. It places roughly 125 cats a year, and in 2003 it organised a “Cat Pride” march through Rome that drew several thousand people. Lia Dequel died in 2013. Silvia Viviani, a retired opera singer, was still working shifts into her eighties.

The 2012 eviction fight and the 2023 reopening

Heritage protection for the cats did not mean the humans were safe. In 2012, with new finds emerging under the street and the Caesar announcement raising the site’s profile, the Superintendency for the Archaeological Heritage of Rome moved to evict the sanctuary, arguing its structures had been built illegally on a protected site. Volunteers collected more than 30,000 signatures. The city backed down, though without a permanent guarantee.

The ending is better than the fight deserved. After a conservation programme funded by Bulgari, the Sacred Area reopened to the public on 20 June 2023 with a raised walkway that floats above the ruins, plus a new entrance, lighting and services. For the first time visitors can walk among the temples at close range. The cats, who had the place to themselves for ninety-odd years, now share it with a queue and appear entirely unbothered.

Does any of it work? Thirty years of data

Rome is one of the few places where trap-neuter-return has run long enough to be studied properly. In February 2019, Eugenia Natoli and colleagues published an evaluation in Frontiers in Veterinary Science covering thirty years of the policy, 1988 to 2018. The numbers are specific.

• 1,878 colonies registered in Rome by 2017, of which 89 had gone extinct.
• 15,713 cats recorded across those colonies, an average of 8.37 cats per colony.
• 204 colonies made up entirely of neutered cats, which makes them demographically stable.
• Neutering between 1991 and 2000 produced a 16 to 32 per cent reduction in cat numbers, offset by roughly 16 per cent new arrivals through abandonment and spontaneous immigration.
• 6 bites from unowned cats out of about 4,600 animal bite reports over a ten-year period.
• 74 suspected poisoning cases between 2008 and 2017, of which 21 were confirmed.

Read those honestly and you get a mixed verdict. Sterilisation works on the colony you sterilise. The bottleneck is human behaviour: people keep abandoning cats, and that inflow eats most of the gain. The authors conclude that management has improved a great deal over thirty years, and that the missing piece is education about responsible ownership rather than any change to the trapping method. The public health figure ends most arguments on its own. Six bites in 4,600 reports is close to statistical noise.

How to visit the cats of the Colosseum without being the annoying tourist

Rules the volunteers repeat constantly, because visitors keep breaking them.

• Do not feed them. Colony cats are on a managed diet and many are on medication.
• Do not pick anything up. These are feral or semi-feral animals with a legal right to be left alone. A cat that wants contact will arrive on its own schedule.
• A clipped ear is not an injury. A cleanly tipped ear is the international mark of a cat that has been trapped, neutered and returned. It means the system worked.
• Do not attempt a rescue. Removing a colony cat is illegal in Italy. The cat is not lost, the cat is home, and technically the cat belongs to the mayor.
• Give money, not tuna. The shelters run on donations and on merchandise made by volunteers.

Nobody optimised these colonies and nobody scaled them. A century of feeding cats in a ruin produced a functioning institution, slowly, mostly by refusing to stop. That is the instinct behind slow living, applied to municipal policy instead of a Sunday morning.

FAQ

Are there still cats inside the Colosseum itself?

The 2001 heritage designation explicitly names the Colosseum colony. Access inside the arena is far tighter than it was decades ago, so the animals are more often seen in the archaeological area around the monument than in the tiers. The easier colony to visit is at Largo di Torre Argentina.

Is it legal to remove a stray cat from a Roman ruin?

No. Under Law 281/1991 free-roaming cats have the right to remain where they live, and colonies cannot be relocated. Harming them is a punishable offence. Adoptions go through the sanctuaries.

Who pays to neuter the cats?

The state. Sterilisation of colony cats is compulsory and free, carried out by the veterinary services of the local health authority. In practice, sanctuaries and volunteers cover much of the trapping, transport and aftercare on top of that.

What does “gattara” actually mean?

It is the Italian word for a person, usually a woman, who feeds and looks after street cats, from gatto. The male form is gattaro. In Rome it carries affection alongside the teasing, partly because figures like Anna Magnani made it part of the city’s self-image. The English “cat lady” is meaner, and the folklore behind that is a separate history, traced in black cat superstitions.

Did the 2023 restoration hurt the sanctuary?

No. The Bulgari-funded works added an elevated walkway designed to keep visitors off the ancient structures, and the site opened to the public on 20 June 2023 with the sanctuary still in place. The eviction threat that peaked in 2012 was seen off by public pressure, including a petition with more than 30,000 signatures.

The short version

The cats of the Colosseum are protected by three layers at once: a national no-kill law from 1991, regional rules in Lazio, and a 2001 Rome decree filing them alongside the ruins as bio-cultural heritage. Behind it sits a century of unpaid women with shopping bags, a sanctuary built over the spot where Caesar was killed, and thirty years of data showing sterilisation works and abandonment keeps undoing it. Rome did not protect its strays out of sentiment. It did it because the cats were already there, refusing to leave, and the paperwork caught up. For more on how cats have outmanoeuvred us since 7500 BC, see our piece on the cat stare.

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