Watch Your Step!
A friend of mine in 1969 from the Oversea School of Rome was interested in archaeology, and he arranged a meetup with him at a major Roman underground subway stop so that we could go exploring.
So we meetup at the subway entrance, both of us carrying long handle shovels, and we walk down the stairs to board the subway to a part of town I was not familiar with. He knew where we were going, so we get off at a mysterious subway stop. We exit the subway, walk up the stairs to the surface streets, and then walk for 45 minutes, block after block.
My friend suddenly says, we are here, and points across the street to this strange clay colored mountain that takes up a whole square block.
The mount was huge by any standards.
The mount covered an area of 20,000 square meters (220,000 sq ft) at its base and with a volume of approximately 580,000 cubic meters (760,000 cu yd). It had a circumference of nearly a kilometer (0.6 mi) and stands 35 meters (115 ft) high.
My friend said CLIMB!
So we slowly climbed up this mount, and I cannot identify what we are walking on, but each footstep you heard a crunch.
It turns out to be an estimated 53 million broken pieces of pottery, used to carry olive oil for lamps and cooking.
This entire street block was just an enormous mountain of fractured clay pottery pieces.
I had never heard of this place.
After a lot of climbing we got to the top and the entire mount back in 1970 was similar to the way it was back in 140 BC. The pile grew each century exponentially to the height of greater than 115 feet, but it settled to 115 feet currently.
My friend said it was time to dig, so we used our shovels to turn over piles of old pottery pieces, hoping for a collection of shards that we could reconstruct back into a pot.
No luck. What we did find was thousands of black scorpions hiding from the sun under the cool clay pottery pieces.
I was frozen in shock for a moment.
I had never seen so many scorpions in one place in my life.
Not this:
I yelled to my friend to run, and we did kind of a controlled panic run off the mount to street level. Once we got over that shock, we checked each other's clothes and hair in case scorpions hitched a ride. Thank goodness none were found.
We took a minute to catch our breathe and calm down. My body was shaking uncontrollably.
Once we recovered, we made the long walk back to the subway entrance, caught a subway back to the main part of Rome to go home, except we detoured to go to a restaurant that served American style food like hamburgers and milk shakes, which was a rarity in Rome.
This restaurant was located on a very popular tourist street with some jet setters and the like. It was like walking down Rodeo Drive in Hollywood with farming tools. Classy.
So we walk down this street in broad daylight, two American teenagers carrying shovels, and we head to the place.
The restaurant has no tables, with a little stand-up area, which is not unusual for Rome, because of the valuable real estate.
So we order our hamburgers and milk shakes and chow down while standing on the street, leaning against the wall. The food was amazing.
We then caught another subway to get to each of our homes.
It was Saturday and only my mom and brother were home, my father was working, which was not unusual for a weekend.
My father came home late for supper, and right away he asks why I was walking on the ritzy street with a shovel.
I was so stunned that he knew, that I could not lie and told him about my adventure.
He told me never do that again, or to take shovels into town and walk around with them.
He also never told me how he knew.
It took me like 20 years to figure out the puzzle.
Number one was that he did not want a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) kid to bring attention to himself or the family in public. He hated public embarrassment when I acted up in any way in public.
Number two was that his work that Saturday was to help man an CIA Observation Post (OP) to watch that street, and saw me and my friend walking with the shovels.
The Agency liked to monitor key important streets for VIP people, diplomats, foreign intelligence Agents, Embassy and Consulate employees, and many other "hot" targeted people.
The OP used various surveillance tools like binoculars, telescopes, telephoto lens on cameras, and the like to physically monitor people traffic.
Little did I know that I stumbled onto Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) surveillance.
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