Huge Etruscan Road Brought To Light

Discovery News ^ | 6-16-2004 | Rossella Lorenzi

[Clara Lou]

I'll bet you're right. There must've been considerable noise, too.

[paulat]

The inscription says, "Do you want fries with that?...Drive ahead, please."

[paulat]

...also reminds me of the toll booth in "Blazing Saddles"....

[RightWhale]

Cobblestone roads, iron horseshoes, and iron rims on the chariot wheels = considerable noise and flying debris. They wouldn't be going much faster than a trot on long trips, that wouldn't be so bad, but around town chariots were a terror. The stories from Pompeii tell of pedestrians leaping for their lives to get out of the way of the young men in their galloping chariots.

[Molly Pitcher]

:-) Mary Ludwig finds it all fascinating, too!

[Spirited]

More!
Thank you, blam...

[sonofatpatcher2]

I'm with you, Val... Where did the lake go?

I've tried Googling "6th"+"1850"+" lake"+"Italy" and got nothing to help.

[VOA]

The stories from Pompeii tell of pedestrians leaping for their lives to get out of the
way of the young men in their galloping chariots.

Historians aren't too far off the mark when they call us "Modern Romans"!

[Arthalion]

Many private chariots had a rudamentary suspension that isolated the passenger area from the suspension via leather straps. Others used leather mesh in place of a hard floor to cushion a standing rider. Some combined both.

IIRC, fixed suspension chariots were pretty much only used in warfare or racing (where unpredictable bouncing could be dangerous). The ride in a leather-shocked chariot wouldn't have been perfectly smooth, but it wouldn't have jarred any teeth loose either.

[SunkenCiv]

The lake was drained in 1850, part of a major campaign to rid Tuscany of malaria. The Arno river has flooded a number of times, sometimes dangerously, most recently in, hmm, late 1940s or early 1950s. 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci came up with a canal idea which would have controlled Arno flooding, provided agricultural irrigation (and an income source from same), permitted Florence to become a sea power, and cut off Pisa's water supply during one of the intermittent wars between those two cities. An idiot relative of some politician was chosen as contractor, and he screwed it up so bad that the project was ruined.

Thanks Val for pingin' me here.

Fortune Is a River: Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli's Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History by Roger D. Masters

George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

[SunkenCiv]

Never got pinged?

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[dread78645]

...also reminds me of the toll booth in "Blazing Saddles"....

"Somebody's got to go back and get a shitload of dimes!"

[SunkenCiv]

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[Nepeta]

I htink of armies in chariots, not regular commercial traffic. Riding horseback would be preferable,

Stirrups did not appear until after the fall of the western empire. Riding without them is doable, but getting on the beast is tougher, as is staying there. Chariots are faster than a ridden horse, and you do have something to hang onto.

[GeronL]

I bet there was plenty of commercial traffic unless the armies needed to march

[SunkenCiv]