Cities of the Underworld
There’s this cool show on Canada’s History Channel called “Cities of the Underworld“. It’s on Friday nights at 8:00pm, and repeated during the week.
The current host is an enthusiastic amateur name Dan Wildman, who keeps up a level of excitement as he crawls through 2,000 year old sewers or hangs in a sling over a 10 storey deep tufa mine.
Aimed at the armchair archaeologist or crypto-historian, it’s all about the simple fact that any city that’s old enough has layers. Sometimes those layers are caves or quarry-caverns, or once ground-level ruins that serve as the base or foundation for more recent or modern structures like churches or even just apartment buildings, whose tenants may know nothing about what exists only a few metres below their building. In Rome there’s Maecenas’ villa. In Naples there’s underground tufa quarries dating back to the city’s founding as a Greek colony (They’re not called Neapolitans fer nuthin’, ya know.) In Paris there’s ancient sewers. There’s tombs and cisterns, graves and catacombs, cult sites and strange (sometimes really strange) ossuaries.
And it’s not just ancient history. There’s subways and bomb shelters, secret labs and secret lairs, access tunnels and escape routes. Cool stuff often unknown today, and inaccessible to everyday tourists.
Lotsa, lotsa fun. It’s even got an IMDB entry, with discussions.