Mastodawn

A visual novel plotline sprung to life:

- Kids at a high school in Rome had been telling each other for decades that there were secret rooms under the school. Teachers laughed it off as playground rumors

- During a protest sit-in, the kids took the opportunity to go where they’re not supposed to go and reported that there were really, definitely secret rooms under the school

- The staff found a mysterious iron door in the basement that apparently no-one knew the purpose of; after getting it open, they found some sort of disused furnace… which opened directly into an entire ancient Roman villa

https://nos.nl/artikel/2617238-scholieren-vinden-1800-jaar-oude-romeinse-villa-onder-eigen-school-in-rome

Scholieren vinden 1800 jaar oude Romeinse villa onder eigen school in Rome

De domus ligt volgens archeologen in een gebied waar grote Romeinse figuren als Augustus, Cicero en Pompeius woonden, maar waar weinig over bekend is.

abadidea 1d ago

the most Roman part of this story is the one where the guy digging the basement accidentally connected directly into an intact ancient manor and didn’t even bother telling anyone because it’d just be more paperwork for everyone

@0xabad1dea Similar story from Malta where some guy digging a cellar maybe a couple of hundred years ago broke through into a neolithic burial chamber but just blocked up the hole and told no one...

@DamonHD @0xabad1dea there is something like this in edinburgh

it is a tourist attraction by now
https://www.realmarykingsclose.com/

there must be so much more stuff underground in a lot of places...

The Real Mary King's Close | Best UK Attraction

Welcome to The Real Mary King's Close. One of Edinburgh's top attractions and only preserved 17th-century street.

The Real Mary King's Close

@thierna @0xabad1dea I used to live more or less above that (the winding stairs down from the flat main entrance front door just stopped abruptly!) but never got a chance to visit...

Abram Kedge🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇨🇦2h ago

@thierna @DamonHD @0xabad1dea Also the South Bridge Vaults in Edinburgh. Apparently a pub landlord leant on a urinal and it fell into a hole. He sent his eight year old son into the hole with a torch (flashlight), and when his son came out he described a maze of old interconnected rooms, with oddities like a fireplace high up on a wall.

The landlord spent years buying up properties along the South Bridge before revealing the existence of the vaults - which were the remains of the medieval buildings that the bridge was constructed over. They didn't bother to demolish the buildings before building the bridge.

The vaults were sealed up some time in the early nineteenth century, having been used as a disease-ridden refuge from the law for the previous century or so.

Chuckles 1d ago

@DamonHD @0xabad1dea obscurity is sometimes the only way conservation happens, sadly

Quinn Norton 1d ago

@0xabad1dea back home in LA I was digging in the garden and found a coke bottle that had to be like over 30 years old, man

epicdemiologist 1d ago

@quinn @0xabad1dea Americans: 100 years is a long time! Europeans: 100 miles is a long way!

@0xabad1dea That actually checks out 😂

@0xabad1dea more or less every city in Italy.

@0xabad1dea me in the arena of Verona. Guide to the woman next to me: you can’t sit there it is an emergency evacuation path. The Lady next to me: since when? Guide: more or less the last two millennia. So would you please stand up?

Jargoggles 1d ago

@0xabad1dea
The problem with ancient historical sites is that they just keep making new ones.

Neo Ehproque 1d ago

@0xabad1dea there's *a lot* of stories like that in Spain only they mostly destroy the stuff just in case the authorities stop the works

some kind of orange shape 1d ago

@0xabad1dea I think this is a route or two in Black Closet (2017)

KielKontrovers Blog 1d ago

@0xabad1dea most strikingly is that these rumors seem to be 1800 years old.

Wait, "dumb" ends in "B"!?1d ago

@kielkontrovers @0xabad1dea "... and some people say that 1800 years from now a school will stand on this very spot! [DUN DUN DUUUUUUUUN]"

⁂ Fish Id Wardrobe 1d ago

@0xabad1dea rather pleasing to confirm the "adults are completely clueless" trope from the best of kids fiction

abadidea 1d ago

@fishidwardrobe in one of the photos you can see graffiti that reads "Indiana Jones 2013"... kids had been successfully getting in for decades before the adults believed them

Petrichor ᚄᚔᚅᚐᚁᚆᚃᚒᚔᚂ 1d ago

@0xabad1dea The most amazing line is “They found the key…”

Dr Alice Violett 1d ago

@0xabad1dea not quite as old(!) but a fancy school near me recently found some Tudor-era tunnels and artefacts: https://newhallschool.co.uk/tudor-tunnels-and-artefacts-discovered-during-repair-works-at-new-hall-school/

Petrichor ᚄᚔᚅᚐᚁᚆᚃᚒᚔᚂ 1d ago

@0xabad1dea no photos of the frescoes, sadly

Petra van Cronenburg 1d ago

@0xabad1dea Reminds me of my childhood in Germany, starring at a dark stinky hole behind a barn. Wind came out of it. We knew about ancient folklore of galleries under the town and told us stories about people fleeing underground.
Today, the restored old galleries are a tourist attraction. And scientists found out, that Carl Schurz, the famous revolutionary, hid in that "Stinkgraben" (stinky ditch) before fleeing to the USA. It connected the town with a village near the French border.

Mr. Lance E Sloan (IRL) 👤1d ago

@0xabad1dea
For decades! How long does it take to graduate from high school there?

abadidea 1d ago

@sloanlance … you must have gone to a very happily boring school, if the seniors never told you any horror stories about things that happened long before you arrived, and you didn’t have anything to tell the incoming freshmen…

Stephen Perdue 1d ago

My high school was that boring, but not happily so. It’s only slightly interesting feature was round building with a hexagonal theater room in the center and movable walls to use 3 surrounding classrooms as folding-chair audience space, inventive in a laughably cheap and inadequate way.

Codey McCodeface 1d ago

@sloanlance @0xabad1dea Heh, we had the Communist submarine in the pond at the back of my high school. Also, the closest bathroom was in the building across the street (which was actually the elementary school).

Mr. Lance E Sloan (IRL) 👤22h ago

@0xabad1dea
Yes, I definitely did go to a boring school. Miserably so. I was happy to leave.

But you missed my point. It was just a very silly joke. Not a good one, actually. That was, does it actually take decades for a student to complete that high school?

I guess I should use sarcasm punctuation or silly emoji to mark my feeble attempts at humor.

Martin Seeger 1d ago

@0xabad1dea Below history there is just more history 😄

peachfront 1d ago

durn, somebody always gotta blab...

🤣

sunflowerinrain 1d ago

@0xabad1dea
There are tunnels under the hamlet where I live. No-one knows where they go; the entrance in the garden of the uninhabited house next door was blocked off decades ago after a rockfall. There are tunnels and caves and grottos all around the area, mostly ignored. A couple of Roman ruins have been excavated, but generally nobody is interested, which puzzles me.

@sunflowerinrain @0xabad1dea our internet infrastructure will be the same way in 100 years

Thomas Lobig 1d ago

@0xabad1dea did they also happen to find a dimension door to a world were animals then taught them magic?

Andrew Deacon 1d ago

@0xabad1dea Fools, aren’t they genre-savvy; this is how evil enters the world.

Tim Ward ⭐🇪🇺🔶 #FBPE 1d ago

@0xabad1dea There were secret rooms and even a secret staircase in the Norman part of my school. Actually they weren't very secret, they were just forbidden, because that's where the caretaker kept his dangerous tools.

DoomsdaysCW 1d ago

@0xabad1dea Ooooh...! Tagging @rogueclassicist !

@0xabad1dea Apple translate inventing great new words again

abadidea 1d ago

@misty the two tokens it got split between were squeezed and wormed :)

abadidea 1d ago

@misty also, did it render stookruimte (“space for stoking (a furnace))” as story? That one’s harder to explain… I think it decided it was a typo for “sprookje” (fairy tale)

@0xabad1dea Fascinating! I wondered about that.

Ok I'm confused because the italian article mentions archaeological excavations in 1895. But then I guess excavations in Rome are so frequent that that might have been forgotten?

Ancient Romans wouldn't have called a building in the city a "villa" (Roman villas were situated in the countryside) but the modern usage is more flexibel...

abadidea 1d ago

@Mab_813 my understanding of the timeline is that, before the school was ever built, in the 1800s, a lead pipe was found where the school now stands, which had the name of a wealthy Roman family carved on it; then the school was built and now they have found the entire villa/manor/whatever-you-want-to-call-it underneath and they are presuming the pipe found a hundred years ago matches the house