ROME UNDERGROUND.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 71, 23 February 1937, Page 10

ROME UNDERGROUND.

ARCHAEOLOGY AND ENGINEERING. After years of discussion and 10 years of study, Rome is to have an underground railway system. Plans for this were approved at a Cabinet meeting in Rome recently. Work is due to begin this month on the first of three trunk linos. It is to be in service before the end of 1940, in time for the “Universal Exhibition” of 1941. It will run from the present railway station west to Piazza Venezia, then south to the sea at Ostia, emerging into daylight after cutting below the Aventine HillA section of the route through the city’s subsoil cuts along classical sites, and arrangements have been made to allow archaeology to go hand in hand ■with underground engineering. Unknown foundations, suspected catacombs, fabled springs and streams, and the friability of the Roman subsoil, combine to present- serious prob- ' The second trunk line will traverse the citv and continue to the hill towns hevnnd. The third line is to cut below the River Tiber and loop round tho city.