History under a loo

All Luciano Faggiano wanted, when he purchased a seemingly unremarkable building at 56 Via Ascanio Grandi, 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.