LECCE,
Italy — All Luciano Faggiano wanted when he purchased the building at 56 Via
Ascanio Grandi in 2000 was to open a trattoria. Mr. Faggiano planned to run the restaurant
on the ground floor and live upstairs with his wife and youngest son. Mr.
Faggiano’s oldest son, Marco, was studying film in Rome. His second son,
Andrea, had left home to attend college.
The building was seemingly modernized, with
clean white walls and a new heating system. The only problem was the toilet. So
Mr. Faggiano asked his two older sons to help him investigate.
“I said, ‘Come, I need your help, and it will
only be a week,’ ” Mr. Faggiano recalled.
But
one week quickly passed, as father and sons discovered a false floor that led
down to another floor of medieval stone, which led to a tomb of the Messapians,
who lived in the region centuries before the birth of Jesus. Soon, the family
discovered a chamber used to store grain by the ancient Romans, and the
basement of a Franciscan convent where nuns once prepared the bodies of the
dead.
Mr
Faggiano did not initially tell his wife about the extent of the work. But she soon became suspicious. “We had all these dirty clothes,
every day,” she said. “I didn’t understand what was going on.”
After
watching the Faggiano men haul away debris in the back seat of the family car,
neighbors also became suspicious and notified the authorities. Investigators
arrived and shut down the excavations, warning Mr. Faggiano against operating
an unapproved archaeological work site.
Mr. Faggiano was later allowed to resume his pursuit of the sewage pipe on condition
that heritage officials observed the work. An underground treasure house
emerged, as the family uncovered ancient vases, Roman devotional bottles, an
ancient ring with Christian symbols, medieval artifacts, hidden frescoes and
more.
“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,” said Giovanni Giangreco, a cultural heritage official, now retired,
involved in overseeing the excavation.
Italy
is a heap of history, with empires and ancient civilizations built atop one
another like layers in a cake. Excavation sites are common in ancient cities
such as Rome, where protected underground relics have for years frozen plans to
expand the subway system.
.Severo
Martini, a member of Lecce’s City Council, said archaeological relics turn up
on a regular basis — and can present a headache for urban planning. A project
to build a shopping mall had to be redesigned after the discovery of an ancient
Roman temple beneath the site of a planned parking lot.
“Whenever
you dig a hole,” Mr. Martini said, “centuries of history come out.”
Mr.
Faggiano’s search for a sewage pipe, which began in 2000, became one family’s
tale of obsession and discovery. Eventually the trattoria became a museum where
relics still turn up today.
