Modern construction in Rome yields ancient discoveries

There's a big dig going on in the historic heart of Rome, with the goal of creating a new state-of-the-art subway line. And with some of the excavation nearly 100 feet underground, archaeologists are taking advantage of untapped sites that were out of reach before. The new Line C route may be a modern engineering achievement, but a simple excavation can quickly become an archaeological feast. PBS NewsHour weekend special correspondent Christopher Livesey has our story. The imperial columns, monuments and temples of Rome's Forum reveal what the city was like 2,000 years ago. It's an ancient wonder of the world, only discovered in the early 1800s after centuries buried under pasture land. Excavating the Forum took decades, and work continues on some areas even today. But big digs like that which uncovered the Forum rarely happen in modern times. Unless it's for something like this. Rome's new subway line, Metro C-Line, running right by the Colosseum, is a huge project requiring drilling and digging down deep and wide. Construction workers work side-by-side with specially trained archaeologists, knowing the city's ancient history is buried in the layers of earth beneath them. This was an extraordinary archaeological opportunity. Simona Moretta is an archaeologist with the Italian government. The digging of this infrastructure, the Metro C-Line, gave us the opportunity to reach an excavation depth that normally is never reached. A normal archaeological excavation usually gets to 20 feet. Instead, we were able to go deep down to over 65 feet. This provided some extraordinary archaeological surprises. One of those surprises came when construction crews came upon this, the ruins of a military barracks and splendid home dating back to the 2nd century AD. Archaeologists expected some kinds of artifacts would be found, but not this. We found a very well-preserved archaeological complex, which the ancient sources don't say anything about, so it was a surprise also for this reason. It was astonishing indeed, not just the soldiers' quarters, but also the commander's home, with its frescoes, with the mosaic floors, which are all well-preserved, was indeed exceptional. The quality of mosaics, especially in the so-called comandante house, was very good. Francesco Prosperetti is Rome's superintendent of archaeology. The most important thing is the dimension. It's very rare to have the possibility inside Rome to find something which is 1,200 square meters. 1,200 square meters. That's 13,000 square feet. But chances are it would never have been found if not for the sea-line construction project. It was the biggest find, but not the first. Earlier, at another sea-line site close by, San Giovanni, the team had discovered the remains of a farm with sophisticated irrigation systems dating back before Christ. The artifacts are now displayed in a mini-museum inside the station, which opened in May. But combining archaeology with mass transit improvements is not without its problems. It increases the cost and slows construction. The entire sea-line project is almost 20 years behind schedule. While some locals were frustrated by the delays, the ones we spoke with considered it part of the cost of living in a city like Rome. Yes, in my opinion, it was definitely worth the wait, especially for this specific stop. You're proud to see this in your neighborhood. I still think that there's been something like a miracle to have the possibility of doing this inside a tube station. Prosperetti now has similar plans for the more recent discovery. The commander's home and barracks, with their mosaic floors and frescoes, have been removed for safety and restoration. But they'll eventually be reassembled in the same place they were discovered, and displayed inside the new Ambaradam station, scheduled to open in 2021. Meanwhile, the digging continues. Is there one spot that you have yet to dig, where you expect to make even more discoveries? The center of Rome. Because we are now approaching the very center of Rome, the part that in the Roman times was called Campo Marzio, in which all the Republican imperial Rome was. We have great expectations.