For the Sake of Accuracy

Yesterday, in writing about seeing the Italian opera tenor Carlo Bergonzi at the Verona opera when I was a kid, I mentioned that it took place in an outdoor soccer stadium where there where maybe 40,000 in attendance -- since after all, in Italy opera is a contact sport.  I mentioned this to someone who was there at the same time, my father.  He corrected my description -- it was not a soccer stadium, it was the Arena di Verona which is a Roman amphitheater.  And he corrected my memory of there possibly being as many as 40,000, though said he thought I wasn't all that far off -- in checking, I found that in ancient times it held 30,000, though that capacity was reduced in the modern era to 22,000.  (Recently, safety efforts were added, and the capacity today is 15,000.)  I've corrected the original story.

But just to let you see I wasn't a-lying, and why a 16-year old sitting on the field in the middle of it all might think the spectacle was slightly more, here it is.