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.
Sometimes I wonder if contractors ever dread working in some European cities because they might have to put the entire project on hold at any time for things like this.
I also wonder how many things have been bulldozed becauase someone didn’t want to stop things and just tossed mosaic tiles in the fill dirt pile…
It’s fascinating to me how much old construction would just be built over with nobody the wiser. Just layers of construction, rubble/natural growth covering things, then more construction. Watching history docs where they break down old cities from the middle east and have evidence of various time periods where it was inhabited… Good stuff.
In my hometown in Spain, there’s a recurring joke every time we see someone building something new that requires digging:
“What do you guess they’re gonna find this time? Romans? Muslims? Jews?”
And the fun thing is that most of the time, they do find one of those three.
I live in small city in Europe and…they do dread it. Especially our old town has overprotective archeologists running amok and they are doing all they can to stop any construction trying to ignore archeological finds. Thanks to god for overprotective archeologists.
I also heard many folk from construction grumble about construction getting stopped because they found piece of medieval wall or something. xD
Thanks to god for overprotective archeologists.
Agreed. There are so many neat, new things to learn, if we can just keep the capitalists in a chill place while they’re acquired. Remember when Richard III was literally found under a parking lot?
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.Major issue and concern for all parties involved.
Both stop of work and destruction of artifacts are common’ occurrence.
Bombs. Many large cities or industrial areas in Germany are peppered with unexploded ordinances. They are even underneath buildings quickly erected after the war and only found when those are being demolished. When properly handled, they luckily don’t pose too much of a risk.
This is basically just another day in Rome. The pretty much just covered things up and built on top of it. If you see the Forum, it sits a good 25-40 feet below where the city is now. I went to church that was built in the 17th century that you could tour below it where it was sitting on a 12th century monastery on top on a 2nd century apartment.
You literally couldn’t drill down anywhere in that city without hitting something from the past two thousand years.
honestly shout out the students and the teacher. I hope the kids didn’t get in trouble. I sure know if I found something like that in highschool I’d be keeping my mouth shut for fear of expulsion or similar.
I kind of wish schools would take you on a more thorough tour of the building once in a while, my high school was pretty huge and there were parts of it we never got to go to, doors we never saw opened, etc.
Now a lot of those were janitors closets and such, mostly nothing too exciting, but one of them in particular had a stairway that went pretty far down and the rumor was always that there was a bomb shelter down there, which is pretty likely because that part of the building was built in the cold war.
And there were a few pretty cool rooms that you’d only get to see if you were in certain clubs and such. We had a whole little public access tv station sort of thing and I never saw more of it than what I could see through the front door because I wasn’t in the TV production club/class, the band orchestra, and choir had some pretty cool rooms that most of the school would never see, there was a whole courtyard that I don’t think I ever saw a single person in the entire time I was there and the doors were usually locked despite the fact that it was completely closed in by the school building, so hardly a security risk, I doubt we were gonna have many people scaling the walls to rappel into the courtyard or parachuting into it
There were also rumors that under our pool was once a bowling alley.
Tell me a story about Italy without telling me the story is from Italy.
Most Americans have no sense of this at all.
Native american cities and villages are constantly being uncovered.
Are they? Neat! Where?
You may enjoy the YouTube channel Desert Drifter if you want see some really cool ruins in the Southwestern USA.
I know the local colleges always have various digs going on. https://www.sltrib.com/news/2023/06/15/students-unearth-1000-year-old/ https://ictnews.org/archive/digging-deep-into-the-world-of-the-fremont-indians/ https://www.gottagoutah.org/a-guide-to-exploring-utahs-archaeological-sites
… If they weren’t unrecognized as human-built (like the Cahokia mounds of Illinois) or deliberately bulldozed, like the Mississippi mounds near Minneapolis.
