Standing at the colonnade's edge, a visitor to ancient Pompeii around 1900 would gaze across this very scene — the vast open courtyard of the Caserma dei Gladiatori (Gladiators' Barracks), its rows of stumpy tufa columns marching into the distance, the grassy training ground silent where fighters once sparred under the Campanian sun before the catastrophe of 79 AD buried everything. This early halftone postcard, published by De Luca e C. of Naples, is a classic of the pre-linen era, printed on thick undivided-back stock with the caption in red type — a format that dates it firmly to the pre-1907 period when the back was reserved entirely for the address and the front caption had to carry all the information. The Gladiators' Barracks (actually a large theatre portico repurposed as gladiatorial quarters in the final years of Pompeii) was one of the first great crowd-pleasers excavated at Pompeii and became a perennial postcard subject. The card shows the long colonnaded walkway in the foreground and the amphitheatre-like seating banks beyond, with Vesuvius-area hills receding into a hazy background sky. A handwritten "200" in pencil on the back suggests a dealer's stock notation. Unused and unposted.