Country · 14 places dug
The history of Italy
40 digs · 454 sourced records · last reviewed 16 October 2026
Strata has dug 14 places in Italy — Rome, Monza, Florence and more: 40 spots of ground, 454 sourced records, from deep time to the modern era. Each place below is a page of its own, assembled from what happened on particular ground there, with every record linked to its source.
Places dug in Italy
The history of RomeA Capuchin church with a bone-lined crypt — Rome gathers its past on a scale few towns can match: a Forum where Caesar's body was burned and a temple later raised over his ashes, an amphitheatre built on Nero's drained lake, baths broken by Gothic siege, and squares that still trace the shapes of a buried stadium and bathhouse beneath Baroque fountains and churches. 15 digs201 records The history of MonzaThe king who did not see it coming — Monza grew up around a Lombard queen's chapel and a thirteenth-century town hall where councils once debated grain prices. 8 digs
81 records The history of FlorenceA private walled garden on old city walls — Florence grew in layers: a Roman city overbuilt by medieval walls and a republic, its central piazza a stage for execution and statecraft, its cathedral raised over an older buried church, and its edges opened into walled gardens and surviving fortifications. 4 digs
35 records The history of Venezia-Murano-BuranoA clock tower timed its light to reach approaching ships — Venezia-Murano-Burano has long depended on a single land link and a square that has always watched the water. 3 digs
44 records The history of CremonaA square that was once a plague cemetery — Cremona rests on Pliocene clay that shaped it into a brick city, fought over at Roman and medieval battles, crowned by the Torrazzo and the Baptistery, and marked in its streets by a small square, Sant'Omobono, once used as a plague cemetery. 1 dig
24 records The history of Santo StefanoA prince died a prisoner steps from Roman ruins — Santo Stefano gathers a long reckoning of Bologna's past: a Roman execution site, a buried temple to Isis, an early medieval cemetery, Hungarian destruction, a false relic scandal, and a vanished Jewish cemetery once the largest medieval burial ground of its kind in Italy. 1 dig
15 records The history of Porto - SaragozzaA prince spent twenty-three years locked in this square — Porto-Saragozza in Bologna is anchored by Piazza del Nettuno, where Palazzo Re Enzo held Enzo of Sardinia captive from 1249 until his death in 1272. 1 dig
12 records The history of VeniceAn enclosed stone bridge over a Venice canal — Venice took shape as a seat of power from 1340 at the Doge's Palace, with justice carried out across the Rio di Palazzo at the enclosed Ponte dei Sospiri, built around 1600 to 1603 to march prisoners from judgment to the New Prisons, later renamed by Byron's verse. 1 dig
12 records The history of PisaSoft clay beneath Pisa made its tower lean — Pisa's ground near Piazza del Duomo rests on soft Pliocene clay, laid down long before building began. 1 dig
10 records The history of ImprunetaAn unnamed farm ridge above the Greve valley — Impruneta sits above the Greve valley, its record stitched together from a theologian's 1477 burial, a basilica rebuilt after the bombing of 1944, and a nearby farm ridge whose real history lies a mile and a half off at Villa di Mondeggi, held in turn by monks, the Bardi, Portinari and della Gherardesca families, and Florence's province from 1964. 1 dig
7 records The history of ComoA Roman arena vanished under Como's city walls — Como grew from Novum Comum, the Roman colony whose arena and baths lie buried near Viale Carlo Cattaneo, through to a medieval walled town built partly over those foundations, later adding Romanesque basilicas, a Modernist landmark, and a 1932 museum to Garibaldi. 1 dig
4 records The history of FernoJet age arrives on million-year-old Lombard clay — Ferno, in the province of Varese, Lombardy, rests on Pliocene clay laid beneath an ancient sea over Cenozoic sedimentary bedrock. 1 dig
3 records The history of PaduaSixteen brass names mark a street in Padua — Padua's record here narrows to a single street, Via Otto Febbraio, where sixteen brass stumbling stones mark Jewish residents arrested in the roundups of 1943 and 1944, among them Marcello Levi Minzi, taken in February 1944 and killed at Auschwitz that August. 1 dig
3 records The history of VeronaGaribaldi vowed "Rome or death" above this Verona square — Verona's ground near Piazza Bra carries layers of contest and commemoration, from Roman and Gothic times through a battle fought here in 1799 to Garibaldi's 1867 cry of "Rome or death" and a plaque honouring the city's sons who died in Libya in 1911. 1 dig
3 records