Roman Ruins in Strange Locations

In this video, you will follow me on a short tour through ancient Italy as I visit 4 Roman ruins in unique places and with strange backstories. From a marble bust sticking out of the side of a church to a Roman wall hidden in a McDonald's...

I hope you enjoy!

And please check out @toldinstone

Citations

0:00 Introduction
1:07 La Berta, Florence
4:45 Plaza del Anfiteatro, Lucca
6:09 Durandal's Mark, Rome
7:43 McDonald's Servian Wall, Rome

[fishy_fish]

This was so fun to watch evolve in real time on twitter, and even better when expertly crafted into a new Trey video

[cyberbully]

Considering La Berta is from the late Roman Empire, and the fact that the tower is made from cobbled stones, I would guess that she was looted from some other building and then just simply used as a cheap impromptu building stone. During the end of the classical period and in to the early medieval era, it wasn't uncommon for old roman structures to be cannibalized for construction.

[shinyagumon]

Your explanation for La Berta is a lot cooler than my first thought: My mind immediately went to the idea of them using old stones while constructing the tower including a broken bust.😅

[Yuric_INC.]

Little fun story, back when I lived in Italy, in the region of Liguria. There was a Hospital me and my family went. But the thing about the hospital is that it was built on top of a Roman mosaic. So the Hospital itself was on top of a platform and below it you could see the Mosaic. also across the road there was a Theatre (the semi-circular ones). but that's a very common problem with the Italian government trying to build new stuff

[JobKiriaku]

I love real life historic easter eggs.

[nicolmiller]

You would probably enjoy Evora in Portugal. People lived in the region for 3000 years and it has everything from stone circles, Roman temples, Moorish tiles, medieval buildings and modern construction. Incredible city.

[pannkale]

It's so nice that people from outside of Europe (especially southern Europe) seem to be really excited about this kind of things, because we southern Europeans tend to dismiss these peculiarities since they are part of our everyday life, and seeing your video makes me realize how cool they actually are :)

[Eyeling]

My Mum was worried you had died when you posted that picture of yourself in that gutter thing. She loves your videos.

[monbec]

"This lump has quite the story" - Only a handful of channels can deliver such a statement with such authenticity.

[doctorwinston]

Things like La Berta bring me to tears in a way I can’t explain. I don’t know why I experience emotion like that at the mere thought of all of history’s potential little secrets and unknowns like that. An ancestral thing maybe, like it’s in my DNA to feel connected in that way. It brings me back to the first time my interest was sparked to human history (particularly in the way of common everyday life back then) which oddly enough was when I first played Assassin’s Creed II (by which time I was already about to graduate high school - as a historian I bloomed late) and interestingly enough, features that very same building in-game, a church I thought I knew everything about but had never heard of La Berta until you mentioned it here. As a likewise queer aspiring historian with a particular interest in late antiquity your channel has been my latest obsession. Your content has made being stuck at home for the last year with a disabling injury bearable in a way that nothing else has. Sorry for over sharing but I really geek out on history and archaeology. Thank you so much for sharing your unique wealth of knowledge. You are a gem!

[stevekovoc]

I love the way that medieval people in a way preserved Roman history while still adapting it to modern use by keeping the same shape and even building blocks of the old coliseum.

[grimus]

I’d imagine a lot of these rulers would feel humbled to know just how far their kingdom and then empire went even after they died and how much of it is still around and recorded even after it fell

[pekvanc]

I love small interesting places like this. I live in Hungary, and study archeology. On a trip to Budapest's Castle our professor stoped us at every single archeological age brick and told a mindblowing story about it. It's also kinda morbid, on an other trip we went into someone's backyard and there was a a bunch of roman graves with skeletons behind glass.
Love your videos, you partially inspired me to study archeology.

[Stoneworks]

Awww ye. An upload from TREY makes a great day.

[dysphoria-chan]

This is something fascinating to me. What we consider ruins of an ancient civilization, an untouchable museum piece, it wasn't for people from 1000 years ago. They probably seemed like garbage to them, something to destroy and rebuild on top of. As you say, many people pass by there without taking it into account, unaware that those ruisn have been there for thousands of years.

It's like we see abandoned buildings or shopping centers today, they're old places that no longer have meaning for us. Sometimes are demolished to build other malls, or remodel them by destroying the original structure. But if the buildings were preserved for another millennium, they would become an important source of information for people of the future. How many of our city landscapes will be the same in a few centuries?

Something similar happens in Mexico City where there are still some remains of Tenochtitlan.

[rubix]

Hey! I'm from Lucca, really happy to see you visited! Also the walls surrounding the city are in part built upon the roman ones, it can be seen in some places

[Shatterverse]

That repurposed hunk of wall theory makes sense. Here in Chicago, after The Great Chicago Fire, materials and even parts of brick walls were reused and integrated into replacements. You can even see a few such places where the bricks radically change in an uneven line on a wall, or very old bricks made into sidewalks. And after the fall of Rome there was all this old ruined stonework just laying around doing nothing, so they would have every reason to just use that.

[kesorangutan]

Dear Trey, La Berta is basically an example of "spolia". It's just reused stone. You can find spolia all around the mediterranean.

[lazchurchyard]

Listen to you, all smooth and smarmy.
I remember when you were just a wee channel with a wee boy voice. You're doing so well, and we're all proud.

[OrbitalLizardStudios]

I'm gonna do some archeology on this video itself! 
At the time of around 6:09, a strange artifact is visible climbing up the far right of the screen. This is the remnant of a more ancient draft of the video, still peeking through the cracks of this present day version.