this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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Italian teenagers discover 1,800-year-old Roman luxury house underneath their high school gym (www.livescience.com)
submitted 1 month ago by FlashMobOfOne@lemmy.world to c/history@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] Fondots@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

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.