The ghost stories of what’s hidden under the gym floor at Rome’s Liceo Scientifico Cavour just got a serious upgrade. Italian teens who snuck into off-limits tunnels beneath their high school not far from the Colosseum ended up stumbling onto part of an opulent Roman home dating back about 1,800 years, as confirmed by archaeologists. Claudia Marino, a history and Latin instructor at the school, alerted authorities to the students’ find, and a formal dig that began in January uncovered a mid-second-century villa now dubbed the “Domus Liceo Cavour,” per Live Science.
Marino, who says the school was built between 1865 and 1885, tells the London Times that students made the discovery about six years ago, and that she and her colleagues went underground themselves once they got wind of it. In the school’s basement, they came across a locked iron door. “We found the key, entered, and we were in an old, disused boiler room,” she says. “Beyond that were ancient Roman walls, a space we squeezed through, and we were in the villa.” Graffiti found on some of the walls feature dates from the ’40s and ’50s, meaning the hidden villa hasn’t been hidden from everybody over the years.
The house—likely tied to the Umbrius family, per one inscription in the villa—features floral frescoes, ceilings of decorated stucco, and a mosaic made of large, irregular tiles, a design once favored by the Roman elite. The high school’s website has some additional photos. The site sits in a historically important neighborhood where figures like Cicero and Augustus once roamed, but modern construction on top of it has long limited excavation there. Only part of the villa beneath the school has been explored. Officials hope to carry out more work there and eventually open the underground rooms to visitors, possibly with students serving as guides.
