It makes you wonder what else is buried beneath the streets of cities built on top of ancient ruins. Cairo, Alexandria, Rome, Mexico City, Athens. Cool stuff, if you ask me.
If you ask contemporary Romans, for a lot of people it's just a huge hassle. It slows down economic activity of all sorts - every time you dig, stuff comes up, work is stopped, and lengthy procedures are started to assess what's there etc etc... This, of course, if you are honest and have time to spare. Less scrupulous individuals will simply loot what they can and keep digging, or even smash everything to bits before anyone can notice.
Rome has one of the most underdeveloped subways among major capitals, simply because digging anything is very difficult: as the article mentions, soil is quite peculiar over there, and technically it's a city built over several hills. Add the archeological element, and you might as well give up.
> Less scrupulous individuals will simply loot what they can and keep digging, or even smash everything to bits before anyone can notice.
Crikey, I have heard countless stories from farmers, old construction workers and so on of coming across burial sites, ancient tools or dinosaur bones, where they have just covered the stuff up, buried it further down another hole or even destroyed it just because they had no care or knowledge of that stuff.
Some of the stories are pretty interesting (like caves with paintings of mega-fauna or sites of ancient fish farming), but some are also horrifying (One old bloke found a giant bone on his property while clearing scrub, he burnt it).
My home town was an important Etruscan city, and still has a huge necropolis.
One of my grand-uncles told me that when he was a kid (early 20th century) when they found ancient vases they used them for sling practice, it was only later that people realized they had any value.
In most of those places you can't put a spade in the ground without hitting some artifact. Archaeologists have to be on call during construction projects.
