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  • Hacker News
  • Whose first instinct is it, when finding an ancient roman villa hidden underneath your school, to smear graffiti on the walls. I cannot relate.
    by MrBuddyCasino
  • It seems that the students who actually reported the ruins may not have been the ones who graffiti'd it. They supposedly heard from other students who'd discovered it before. Whether or not that's true is harder to say.
    by txru
  • A caption for one of the photos:

    > A room with monochrome stucco decorations Cantieri Narranti

    Unlikely. We know that the white marble statues that we have were once painted. Time turned them into what we see today. This room was surely vividly painted.

    by alsetmusic
  • Clickbait title

    > The students who found a way into the ruins weren’t the first amateur explorers to rediscover the site. Some of the graffiti scrawled on the walls of the villa dates to between 1920 and 1950, when the building was occupied by a religious order. Other markings are more recent, perhaps left by students at the high school

    by yesitcan
  • Did the ruins come alive at night with like Roman soldiers and stuff running around, etc?
    by newaccountman2
  • It's pretty much like this everywhere in Italy. I'm originally from southern Italy and my father worked as a laborer for a local municipality. About 20 years ago, during excavation work to rebuild a wall, he personally unearthed some pottery that turned out to be the contents of a Magna Graecia storehouse dating back roughly 3,000 years. Another time, more recently, on the outskirts of my hometown, during roadwork to repave a sidewalk, a Greek tomb dating back approximately 2,400 years was discovered. The lands around the Mediterranean have been inhabited for so long that wherever you dig, you're very likely to find some kind of artifact.
    by giuseony
  • In my tuscanian city the university is building a new building for the engineering department. While digging they randomly found an ancient etruscan well. In this case everything went smoothly and timely and it will be preserved, an underground parking near the center had ww2 remains and deeper than that, archeological ones that slowed down the whole thing
    by amarcheschi
  • I feel like the real news story is kids protesting against school being closed
    by lqstuart
  • There must be a metaphor somewhere in this, when somehow it is the angry youth that discovers something of value hidden in plain view that no one bothered to look at before !
    by Dependance
  • There was graffiti as well so others had already found it
    by hvb2
  • I visited Rome last year. There was a lot of talk about how long it was taking to build a new subway line, because they kept running into ancient artifacts. It was also commonly said that the city was like a lasagna, with layers upon layers of history under everything. Building that were originally built elevated are now at street level.

    It almost seems hard not to find ancient ruins. It then becomes a question of priorities and resource allocation.

    by al_borland
  • As an American, where we have comparatively little history (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!) visiting Rome is almost mind blowing to see SO MUCH ancient history right there, and almost everywhere. So cool!
    by DougN7
  • some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!

    TBF, so do some folks in the U. S.; though in most cases, just barely.

    by mikestew
  • Early settlement of Europeans into present-day USA started in earnest in the early 1600s.
    by mothballed
  • > we have comparatively little history (we’re celebrating 250 years)

    You didn't exactly say this, but I'd stop short of defining history around the existence of the current US government and structure. Ironically 250 years is probably longer than any continental European government has been around in its present state.

    In terms of history as such, we have just as much history in the US as Europe does. Just ask the Native Americans / First People. There are lots of examples elsewhere in the conversation.

    by quadrifoliate
  • 250 years is longer than the existence of a country called Italy, let alone the Italian Republic. Just like in Italy, the history of people in your area did not start with the founding of your country.
    by derdi
  • I was in Pompeii just 2 weeks ago, the thing that absolutely blew my mind was that there is a section where archeologists are working _right now_ still uncovering more buildings, and you can see them exactly as they are coming out of the ground - I think with the rest of the ruins I've had this feeling that you know, it got somehow cleaned up and repaired a bit for tourists, but nope, you can see in that section of active excavation works that these 2000 years old structures are really coming out of the dirt with the frescoes and mosaics still intact.

    And then we went to Paestum, which is an even older Greek settlement in Italy - with the original Greek temples still standing. Mindblowing, and I'm used to old stuff being around(a friend of mine lives in a house where a portion of it is a listed structure dating to the 12th century, it's just a bathroom and a storage room for them lol).

    by gambiting
  • > (we’re celebrating 250 years - some folks in Europe live in houses older than that!)

    We used to smoke weed on the roman wall behind my friend’s high school. Very popular hangout spot. Lots of people using it for rock climbing practice (you’re not far off the ground and can climb laterally for hundreds of meters).

    The local castle, about 1000 years old, is a popular makeout spot for teens.

    by Swizec
  • There are older structures and artifacts than 250 years, they're just not European in origin. Like Cahokia Mounds in Illinois: https://cahokiamounds.org/

    Arrowheads are an example of something that's not too difficult to find in the wild if you know where to look.

    by cableshaft
  • Comparatively few historical ruins built out of materials that would have lasted this long, but a long history, actually, and some you can still see...

    Mexico City is a quick plane ride from the USA, and while some of their ruins are buried, you can hop a short bus ride outside the city to walk among standing ruins of Teotihuacan, the largest city in the Western Hemisphere at the time Jesus walked on the Earth. It was 20 square kilometers whereas Rome at the height of the empire had only 14 square kilometers within the Aurelian Walls.

    I've been on the Great Wall of China and all over the world and Teotihuacan was fascinating for me to see. Even more intriguing, no one knows who built it. Aztecs discovered it many centuries after it was abandoned and forever wondered about its origin.

    by stephenhuey
  • In Italy, almost anywhere you can find roman artifacts. They're just in the layer underneath the WW2 bombs.
    by napolux
  • It's truly amazing. In Rome, you can find ruins of all historical periods, all the way up to early 2020s!
    by karmakurtisaani
  • > To William’s complete lack of surprise, the little cellar under the shed was much better built than the shed itself. But then, practically everywhere in Ankh-Morpork had cellars that were once the first or even second or third floors of ancient buildings, built at the time of one of the city’s empires when men thought that the future was going to last for ever. And then the river had flooded and brought mud with it, and walls had gone higher and, now, what Ankh-Morpork was built on was mostly Ankh-Morpork. People said that anyone with a good sense of direction and a pickaxe could cross the city underground by simply knocking holes in walls.
    by fredley
  • Vot a nice... castle...
    by theturtlemoves
  • Old cities used to just level old buildings and build on top of the rubble.

    But that doesn’t work if you need to support a skyscraper (not if you want it to stay upright), or dig a metro line, so new developments are now excavating the old rubble.

    by mr_toad
  • For a modern example, see the Raising of Chicago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_Chicago. I think I've seen an image of what the old ground level looks like now, and / or that you can take tours there. There's probably loads of stuff buried there now.

    Edit: Actually it was Seattle, you can still visit its old ground level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seattle_Underground

    by Cthulhu_
  • Having lived in Italy for 7 years as a teen, the word is that construction of commercial, governmental, and private sites will be shut down for sometimes years so the Italian government and bureaucracy can have its go in deciding what action to take. A Roman era catacomb was found when my sister's school was being expanded, and the Nuns running the school managed to hush it up pretty well. I imagine they explained to the working crew their loss of a job if word got out..

    It seems reasonable a similar thing happened here even as far back as the 1870s when the original construction was taking place.

    by nstents
  • Similar thing in Tunisia where if ruins are found, the government will own the site. Theoretically, it should compensate the owners for their loss, but practically they pay peanuts. So if people find ruins in their lands, they just hide it/throw it/bury it.
    by csomar