Centuries of History Are Unearthed in a Quest to Fix a Pipe
LECCE, ITALY: All Luciano Faggiano wanted when he
purchased the seemingly unremarkable building at 56 Via Ascanio Grandi was to
open a trattoria, a kind of restaurant. He could run the trattoria on the
ground floor and live upstairs with his wife and youngest son. The only problem was the toilet. Sewage kept backing up. So Faggiano enlisted his two older
sons to help him dig a trench and investigate the underground sewage pipe. He
predicted the job would take about a week, and soon after he would open his
trattoria. If only. "We found underground corridors and other rooms, so we
kept digging," said Faggiano, 60. "Instead of a week, the excavation
lasted seven years."
Faggiano's search for a sewage pipe, which began in 2000,
became one family's tale of obsession and discovery, of Italian bureaucracy and
dirty laundry. He found a subterranean world tracing back to before the birth
of Christ: a Messapian tomb, a Roman granary, a Franciscan chapel and even
etchings from the Knights Templar. His trattoria instead became a museum, where
relics still turn up today. Italy is a slag heap of history, with empires and ancient
civilizations built atop one another like layers in a cake. Farmers still
unearth Etruscan pottery while plowing their fields. Excavation sites are
common in ancient cities such as Rome, where protected underground relics have
for years impeded plans to expand the subway system.
Located in the heel of the Italian boot, Lecce was once a
critical crossroads in the Mediterranean, coveted by invaders from Greeks to
Romans to Ottomans to Normans to Lombards. For centuries, a marble column
bearing a statue of Lecce's patron saint, Orontius, dominated the city's
central piazza - until historians, in 1901, discovered a Roman amphitheater
below, leading to the relocation of the column so that the amphitheater could
be excavated.
"The very first layers of Lecce date to the time of
Homer, or at least according to legend," said Mario De Marco, a local
historian and author, noting that invaders were enticed by the city's strategic
location and the prospects for looting. "Each one of these populations
came and left a trace."
Severo Martini, a member of the City Council, said
archaeological relics turn up on a regular basis - and can present a headache
for urban planning. An ongoing 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," Martini said,
"centuries of history come out."
Ask the Faggiano family. Before they started digging,
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. "I said, 'Come, I need your help, and it will only be a week,'"
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
Christ. Soon, the family discovered a chamber used to store grain by the
ancient Romans, as well as the basement of a Franciscan convent where nuns had
once prepared the bodies of the dead.
If this history only later became clear, what was
immediately obvious was that locating the pipe would be a much bigger project
than Faggiano had anticipated. He did not initially tell his wife about the
extent of the work, possibly because he was tying a rope around the chest of
his youngest son, Davide, then 12, and lowering him to dig in small, darkened
openings. "I made sure to tell him not to tell his mama," he
said. His wife, Anna Maria Sano, 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
Faggiano against operating an unapproved archaeological work site. Faggiano
responded that he was just looking for a sewage pipe. A year passed. Finally, Faggiano was allowed to resume his
pursuit of the sewage pipe on condition that cultural heritage officials
observed the work. Soon, 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. City officials, sensing a major find, brought in an
archaeologist, even as the Faggianos were left to do the excavation work and
bear the costs. Faggiano also engaged in another sort of excavation - extensive
research into the eras tiered below him. The two older sons, Marco and Andrea,
found their lives interrupted by their father's quest.
"We were kind of forced to do it," said Andrea,
now 34, laughing. "I was going to university but then I would go home to
excavate. Marco as well." Faggiano still dreamed of a trattoria, even if the project
had become his white whale. He supported his family by renting an upstairs
floor in the building and from income on other properties. "I was still digging to find my pipe," he said. "Everyday we
would find new artifacts."
Years passed. His sons managed to escape, with Andrea moving
to London. City archaeologists pushed Faggiano to keep going. His own architect
advised that digging deeper would help clear out sludge below the planned
bathroom, should he still hope to open his trattoria. He admits he also became
obsessed. "At one point, I couldn't take it anymore," he
recalled. "I bought cinder blocks and was going to cover it up and pretend
it had never happened. "I don't wish it on anyone."
Today, the building is Museum Faggiano, an independent
archaeological museum authorized by the Lecce government. Spiral metal
stairwells allow visitors to descend through the underground chambers, while
sections of glass flooring underscore the building's different historical
layers.
His docent, Rosa Anna Romano, is the widow of an amateur
speleologist who helped discover the Grotto of Cervi, a cave on the coastline
near Lecce that is decorated in Neolithic pictographs. While taking an outdoor
bathroom break, the husband had noticed holes in the ground that led to the
underground grotto.
"We were brought together by sewage systems,"
Faggiano joked. Faggiano is now satisfied with his museum, but he has not
forgotten about the trattoria. A few years into his excavation, he finally
found his sewage pipe. It was, indeed, broken. He has since bought another
building and is again planning for a trattoria, assuming it does not need any
renovations. He has no plans to lift a shovel. "I still want it," he said of the trattoria.
"I'm very stubborn."
