Centuries of artefacts in one small house

Luciano Faggiano unearthed more than 2,000 years of history in his stone house in Italy

When my husband and I had our house renovated in 2006, contractors ripped open the ceiling and found a short flight of stairs leading to nowhere, a lit bulb still burning brightly at the top.

The house was built in 1972. Had someone hoped to create an attic room and was thwarted by time, ability or lack of funds?

It was a minor mystery, and we gave it little thought.

SURPRISING DISCOVERY

When Luciano Faggiano tore up the floor of a stone house he owned in Lecce, Italy, in 2001 to try and find the source of dampness emanating from below, he unearthed more than 2,000 years of history.

On our first night in Lecce — a city of roughly 97,000 people on the heel of Italy’s boot — my husband and I walked past the museum created from Faggiano’s finds.

It was fairly unassuming: a stone house on a quiet cobblestone street. An old wooden bicycle and some storyboards with black-and-white photos out front were all that distinguished it from its neighbours.

I imagined a cramped and dusty interior with perhaps some faded displays.

When we actually visited Museo Archeologico Faggiano on March 9, I was astonished by the depth and breadth of history Faggiano had discovered (with help from his sons).

HOUSE OF HISTORY

The house is a warren of rooms, two floors up and two down, revealing the preoccupations of the people who inhabited it, from the Messapians of the 5th century BC to the Knights Templar of the 12th and 13th centuries to the convent of Franciscan nuns in the 16th century, and lord only knows who in between.

Eventually watched over by government archeologists, Faggiano found Knights Templar symbols etched into the stone, as well as escape rooms, a granary, a repository for human bones, a dark stone well — 26 feet deep and notched on one side for ascending and descending.

The Faggiano family says they were allowed to keep only one per cent of what they found; the rest was whisked away by the government and placed in storage, but what they’ve kept is a dizzying display of pieces of the past.

LOOK BACK IN TIME

There was ancient plumbing inside the walls — lengths of terracotta cylinders stacked on top of each other. Pieces of jugs and plates, dolls and shells, amphorae, earthenware cooking vessels and glass bottles, painted clay pitchers and candlesticks.

Colourful shards of broken crockery have been incorporated into the masonry. There are angels in the architecture — a 12th-century celestial face carved into the Lecce stone.

In one 16th-century room upstairs, a cross made of volcanic tuff stone forms the main structure of the vaulted ceiling, while the rest is composed of approximately 600 grey and red earthenware jars embedded in the mortar, with only their round bases showing — a Roman building technique.

LIVES LIVED AND LOST

In a lonely recess in a lower stone wall, a tiny tomb has been carved out of the rock to hold the body of an infant. Approximately two feet long by a foot across, its roughly hewn stone slab cover lies next to it.

How many lives were lived in this place? How many lives ended?

How many people found shelter here, greeted the new day from the stone windows, slept in its cavernous depths, drew water from the well to bathe their children? Hid from enemies in the escape rooms? Saw violence, found peace?

Part of a Latin engraving uncovered from the nuns’ era speaks to their unquestioning faith: Si Deus pro nobis quis contras nos? (If God is with us, who can be against us?)

A MENTAL VOYAGE

From the rooftop of the museum, there is a lookout with an expansive view of Lecce — crumbling terracotta roof tiles encrusted in lichen, residential terraces with containers of cacti, a smattering of antennae and the soot-stained backs of old buildings.

A mental voyage begins, as you time travel from ancient history back to today.

As we prepare to leave, we chat with a friendly couple from the United States. He was a firefighter in Washington, D.C., called to respond at 9-11.

The spell with the past abruptly broken, we walk out into the present.