For years, students at a high school just steps from the Colosseum in Rome have spun tales of mysterious rooms hidden underneath the gymnasium floor. Now, it turns out those rumors have more than a grain of truth to them.
Students on several clandestine explorations happened upon an ancient structure beneath their school. Upon notifying their teacher, who notified the authorities, archaeologists arrived to take a more detailed look. Following an excavation earlier this year, archaeologists have announced that the dark corridors and dimly lit chambers actually belonged to a luxurious second-century villa.
The Liceo Scientifico Cavour (Cavour Scientific High School) is located in a building near the Colosseum that originally housed a Catholic missionary congregation. When the missionaries’ headquarters were constructed in the late 19th century, early archaeological exploration of the foundation revealed part of a “domus” — a large ancient Roman house. This neighborhood is incredibly important in Roman history, as figures such as Cicero, Pompey and Octavian (later known as Augustus) lived there, but is not well-understood archaeologically because of all the modern buildings on top of the ancient layers.
Well, it’s usually not the contractors that are most affected, but rather the land owners.
But yeah, archeological findings or WWII bombs can shut your construction down for months, if not forever.
What’s also always loved, is when your building or a neighboring building is so old that it’s declared a cultural heritage site.
My grandparents’ house came with a section of medieval city wall. They used it like an attic, because they weren’t allowed to put heating into there or anything like that, and you basically always needed a permit for structural changes.