185
Italian teenagers discover 1,800-year-old Roman luxury house underneath their high school gym
(www.livescience.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
185 points (99.5% liked)
History
6892 readers
5 users here now
Welcome to History!
A community dedicated to sharing and discussing fascinating historical facts from all periods and regions.
Rules:
-
Post about history. Ask a question about the past, share a link to an article about something historical, or talk about something related to history that interests you. Discussion is encouraged.
-
No memes. No ads. No promos. No politics. No spam.
-
No porn.
-
We like facts and reliable sources here. While sources like Quora/Reddit/Wikipedia can be great tools for quick searches, we do not allow such user-generated content as primary source. What’s wrong with Wikipedia?
NOTE: Personal attacks and insults will not be tolerated. Stick to talking about the historical topic at hand in your comments. Insults and personal attacks will get you an immediate ban.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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
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.
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.
Major issue and concern for all parties involved.
Both stop of work and destruction of artifacts are common' occurrence.