image via – youtube.com
For years Luciano Faggiano had dreamed of opening his own trattoria. He had planned out everything to make the family restaurant possible and knew exactly what he wanted to include on the menu. The trattoria would be run out of his family home located at 56 Via Ascanio Grandi in Lecce, Italy, with the dining room on the ground floor and his family living quarters on the second floor.
Luciano had everything ready to go but one problem stood in his way, a leaky toilet that kept backing up. If he was going to serve delicious homemade food, he couldn’t have sewage stinking up the place and so he had to get it fixed right away. Luckily his two sons who were normally at college were home and so he had them help with the repairs.
The father son team started by slowly chipping away at the flooring to get to what they suspected was a leaky pipe. That’s when they noticed that there was a false bottom and what actually lay underneath was an open space. The smaller of the two boys was able to squeeze into the hole and what he found down there in the dark was a whole other extraordinary world.
It turned out that the Faggiano’s had found passageways and chambers that were abandoned, forgotten, and left dormant long ago. They set about excavating the underground tunnels which turned out to be a lot of work that required the removal of tons of dirt. When a suspicious neighbor noticed that an alarming amount of dirt was being brought out of the family home, they called the authorities who sent over an inspector.
When they found out what was going on, they charged Luciano with conducting an illegal excavation. While he was found guilty, he luckily escaped having to pay major fines. Any and all excavation work was ordered stopped by the courts until they decided on how to proceed. Luciano had still not found the leaky pipe and so he couldn’t open his trattoria, but now he was focused on finding out what lay beneath his home.
Finally a decision had been reached and the court said he could continue digging but only with a member of the Italian Ministry of Culture present. That way if anything of historical significance was found, it could be properly examined and preserved. Luciano got back to work and was busy trying to find the pesky pipe that was still leaking when he stumbled upon some old pavement. According to the expert on hand, it dated back to the medieval period, yet a little further searching led them to an even bigger discovery.
The Faggiano’s ended up in a Mesopotamian tomb which dated back 500 years before Christ! Further exploration uncovered a Roman granary, a Franciscan chapel, and artworks from the Knights Templar. All these amazing discoveries gave Luciano a new business idea, instead of an Italian trattoria, he’d turn his home into a museum. However, once again the authorities put a halt to his plans.
After the local government seized the best artifacts found under the house, they allowed him to open his museum. Today it is called the Museum Faggiano and anyone can visit the underground rooms and passageways to see Italian history through the ages.
Watch the video below for the full story:
Please SHARE This With Family and Friends
