Broken toilet leads to the discovery of 2,000 years of history beneath the Italian restaurant

A blocked toilet in an Italian building has changed the life of its owner who was planning to open a trattoria on the site. Lucian Faggiano was trying to find the offending sewage pipe at the property in Puglia, Italy when he made a fascinating discovery.

After digging a trench beneath the building he found a network of underground rooms and corridors that housed Roman devotional bottles, ancient vases, hidden frescoes and what are thought to be etchings from the Knights Templar.

Lucian Faggiano bought the building in Lecce, Puglia in the south of Italy and had planned to turn it into a trattoria – but renovations were put on hold when he discovered a toilet on the site was blocked. 

And while attempting to fix the toilet he dug into a Messapian tomb built 2,000 years ago, a Roman granary, a Franciscan chapel, and even etchings thought to be made by the Knights Templar.

In a bid to stop the sewage backing up, Mr Faggiano, 60, and his two sons dug a trench and instead of isolating the offending pipe found underground corridors and rooms beneath the property on 56 Via Ascanio Grandi. 

The search for the pipe began at the turn of the millennium.  

Lecce, at the heel of Italy’s boot’, was once a crossroads in the Mediterranean and an important trading post for the Romans. But the first layers of the city date to the time of Homer, according to local historian Mario De Marco. It is not unusual for religious relics to turn up in fields or in the middle of the city itself, which has a mixture of old architecture

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For example, a century ago, a Roman amphitheatre was recently found beneath a marble column bearing the statue of Lecce’s patron saint, Orontius in the main square and recently a Roman temple was found under a car park.

‘Whenever you dig a hole, centuries of history come out,’ said Severo Martini, a member of the City Council.  Mr Faggiano asked his sons to help fix the problem with the plumbing so he could accelerate the opening of his restaurant, in a building that looked like it was modernised.

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But when they dug down they hit a floor of medieval stone, beneath which was a Messapian tomb, built by people who lived in the area before the birth of Jesus. Legend has it the city was founded by the Messapii, who are said to have been Cretans in Greek records, but then the settlement was called Sybar.

Upon further investigation, the family team also discovered a Roman room that was used to store grain and a basement of a Franciscan convent where nuns were thought to have once prepared the bodies of the dead.

Afraid of costs and the delay in opening the restaurant, Mr Faggiano initially kept his amateur archaeology a secret from his wife, in part perhaps because he was lowering his youngest son, Davide, 12 though small gaps in the floor to aid his work.

But his wife, Anna Maria Sanò suspected the work was more complex than it appeared thanks to the number of dirty clothes she was washing, and because of dirt and debris is taken away. 

Investigators shut down the site, warning Mr Faggiano he was conducting an unofficial archaeological dig.  After a year, work continued but had to be overseen by heritage officials who witnessed the emergence of Roman devotional bottles, ancient vases and a ring with Christian symbols as well as hidden frescoes and medieval pieces.

Retired cultural heritage official, Giovanni Giangreco, who was involved with the excavation, said: ‘The Faggiano house has layers that are representative of almost all of the city’s history, from the Messapians to the Romans, from the medieval to the Byzantine time.’

Despite bearing the financial load of the dig, the family became fascinated about the history beneath their building and made ends meet by renting rooms in it. Mr Faggiano admits to becoming obsessed with the project but still wanted to open his restaurant.

He said: ‘At one point, I couldn’t take it anymore I bought cinder blocks and was going to cover it up and pretend it had never happened.’

Eight years after it was meant to open as a restaurant, the incredible building has been turned into Museum Faggiano and a number of staircases allow visitors to travel down through time to visit the ancient underground chambers.

However, Mr Faggiano hasn’t given up on his culinary dream and is planning on opening a restaurant at a less complex location – even though he finally found the troublesome sewage pipe.

Lasers removed stains on a fresco in Pompeii’s House of the Ceii

One of Pompeii’s most action-packed frescoes has regained some of its colours after lasers removed centuries-old stains and restorers touched up worn paint.

Featuring a lion chasing a bull, wild boar bearing down on deer and a leopard pouncing on sheep, the large fresco adorned the garden wall of the Pompeiian magistrate Lucius Ceius Secundus. Vegetation runs along the foot of the fresco, while the owner’s passion for Egypt is revealed by images on a sidewall of sacred Egyptian buildings and African pygmies hunting hippopotamuses and crocodiles.

The artwork — of hunting scenes — was painted in the so-called ‘Third’ or ‘Ornate’ Pompeii style, which was popular around 20–10 BC and featured vibrant colours.

In 79 AD, however, the house and the rest of the Pompeii was submerged beneath pyroclastic flows of searing gas and volcanic matter from the eruption of Vesuvius. Poor maintenance since the house was dug up in 1913–14 saw the hunting fresco and others deteriorate, particularly at the bottom, which is more vulnerable to humidity.

The main section of the fresco depicts a lion pursuing a bull, a leopard pouncing on sheep and a wild boar charging towards some deer. Frescos commonly adorned the perimeter walls of Pompeiian gardens and were intended to evoke an atmosphere — often one of tranquillity — while also creating the illusion that the area was larger than in reality, much as we use mirrors today.

‘What makes this fresco so special is that it is complete — something which is rare for such a large fresco at Pompeii,’ site director Massimo Osanna told The Times.

Alongside the haunting imagery of the now restored fresco, with its wild animals, the sidewalls of the garden featured Egyptian-themed landscapes, with beasts of the Nile delta-like crocodiles and hippopotamuses hunted by African pygmies and a ship shown transporting amphorae.

Experts believe the owner of the townhouse, or ‘domus’, had a connection or fascination with Egypt and potentially also the cult of Isis, that of the wife of the Egyptian god of the afterlife, which was popular in Pompeii in its final years.

In fact, the residence has been associated with one Lucius Ceius Secundus, a magistrate — based on an electoral inscription found on the building’s exterior — and it is after him that it takes its name, ‘Casa dei Ceii’.

The property, which stood for some two centuries before the eruption, is one of the rare examples of a Domus in the somewhat severe style of the late Samnite period of the second century BC.

The house’s front façade sports an imitation ‘opus quadratum’ (cut stone block) design in white stucco and a high entranceway set between two rectangular pilasters capped with cube-shaped capitals. 

Casa dei Ceii’s footprint covered some 3,100 square feet (288 sq. m) and contained an unusual tetrastyle (four-pillared) atrium and a rainwater-collecting impluvium basin in a Grecian style, one rare for Pompeii, lined with cut amphora fragments.

Other rooms found inside the property included a triclinium, where lunch would have been taken, two storage rooms, a tablinum which the master of the house would have used as an office and reception room and a kitchen with a latrine.

An upper floor, which partially collapsed during the eruption, would have been used by the household servants and appeared to be in the process of being renovated or constructed at the time of the catastrophe.

The garden on whose back wall was adorned by the hunting fresco, meanwhile, featured a canal and two fountains, one of a nymph and the other a sphynx.

During the excavation of the townhouse, archaeologists found the skeleton of a turtle preserved in the garden. The recent restoration work saw the paint film of much of the fresco — particularly a section featuring botanical decoration — carefully cleaned with a special laser.

Experts also carefully retouched the paint in areas of the fresco that had been abraded over time,  protective measures have also been taken to help prevent the future infiltration of rainwater that could damage the artwork.

Venetian Blue Beads Found in Alaska Predate Arrival of Columbus

Tiny glass beads from Venice made their way to Alaska decades before Christopher Columbus‘ arrival in the New World. The beads, the colour and size of blueberries, were uncovered in a house pit in Punyik Point, a seasonal Inuit camp near the Continental Divide in Alaska’s Brooks Range.

Archaeologists determined the objects were created between 1440 and 1480 following a radiocarbon-dating of twine that held the jewellery.

Researchers from the University of Alaska suggest the beads were among trinkets that passed hands through various trade routes — starting in Europe, then along the Silk Road to China, through Siberia and finally to the Bering Strait.  According to the study, the new discovery resets the clock on when traded began between Europe and North America.

Mike Kunz, an archaeologist with the university’s Museum of the North in Fairbanks, discovered a total of 10 beads in three locations in the Brooks Range: Punyik Point, Kinyiksugvik and Lake Kaiyak House.

Kunz theorizes the baubles were just small piece of a number of trinkets that made their way various trade routes that began in Europe, then along the Silk Road to China, through Siberia and finally across the Bering Strait.

They were then presumably brought across the frigid Arctic Ocean to Alaska by kayak.  Punyik Point was a popular stopping point for traders, Kunz says, because of the many caribou in the area. 

‘And, if for some reason the caribou didn’t migrate through where you were, [it also] had excellent lake trout and large shrub-willow patches,’ he added. University of Wisconsin archaeologist William Irving found several turquoise beads at Punyik Point in the 1950s and 1960s.

But Irving had no way to know when they were deposited.

Flash forward to 2004, when Kunz and Bureau of Land Management archaeologist Robin Mills returned to the ancient campsite. They found three more beads there, along with copper bangles, metal loops that could have been earrings and other metal pieces that could have been part of a necklace or bracelet.

Wrapped around one of the bangles was a twine that had survived centuries of burial just a few inches below the surface. Because the twine is made of plant fibres — probably the inner bark of shrub willow, the scientists surmised— it meant they finally had an organic matter to conduct radiocarbon dating on using Accelerator mass spectrometry.

‘We almost fell over backwards,’ Kunz said in a release. ‘It came back saying [the plant was alive at] some time during the 1400s. It was like, Wow!’

With that information, along with radiocarbon dating of charcoal found nearby, they surmised the glass beads at all three locales arrived at some point between 1440 and 1480.

‘The beads challenge the currently accepted chronology for the development of their production methodology, availability, and presence in the Americas,’ the researchers wrote in a new paper in the journal American Antiquity.

‘This is the first documented instance of the presence of indubitable European materials in prehistoric sites in the Western Hemisphere as the result of overland transport across the Eurasian continent.’ 

According to Kunz and Mills, the beads probably made landfall at Shashalik, an ancient trading post north of modern-day Kotzebue, and then were transported further inland.

The archaeologists theorize they were part of a necklace or other piece of jewellery.  The item’s location, at the entrance to an underground house, suggests it was dropped or discarded rather than intentionally buried.

Venice has been known as a glassmaking mecca for over 1,500 years, with the island of Murano the centre of production since at least the 13th century.

Columbus’ ships landed in the Bahamas in October 1492, before venturing on to Cuba and Haiti, where he started the first European settlement in the Americas since the Norse some 500 years earlier. 

After briefly returning to Spain, Columbus made three more voyages to the New World between 1493 and 1502, exploring the Lesser Antilles, Trinidad, Puerto Rico and the northern coast of South America. 

The bead variety, commonly known as ‘Early Blue’ and ‘Ichtucknee Plain,’ has been found throughout the Caribbean, the east coasts of Central and North America, and the eastern Great Lakes region, but only after Columbus’ arrival, generally between 1550 and 1750.