Итальянец приговорен за создание поддельного греческого амфитеатра из полистирола

The story emerging out of Italy is genuinely wild. We’ve heard of people faking historical artifacts before, but it’s usually something like a vase or maybe a statue. It’s not usually a whole Greek amphitheater. The story comes from Arcugnano, which is in the Veneto region of northern Italy. Franco Malosso now faces charges for forging a work of art, building without authorization and destroying a protected landscape. What’s genuinely puzzling is why, given that he began promoting the site in 2014, it took more than a decade for all this to wind up in court. He hired local builders to create the place, so at least some folks in the area were well aware it wasn’t ancient. He told them to “make it look old,” according to one of the builders who worked on the site and testified in court. Part of the delay was likely how he structured ticket prices. People who came from out of town were charged 12 euros, about $14. Locals had to pay 40 euros. That kept most people who lived nearby and were most likely to spot the fraud from visiting. The site was reported to authorities two years after it opened. And, given the fact that it’s pretty hard to argue polystyrene was a construction component used by the Greeks, this looks like a slam dunk case. Italy, of course, has no shortage of real ancient ruins, including some from Greek colonies that predate the Roman expansion. For history lovers, the Mediterranean is catnip. Zoom out a bit, and Europe’s history can leave Americans thinking most of what we have in North America is new. It can feel less impressive. That’s a mistake. The land here isn’t any newer. Yes, people likely arrived later, but there’s still plenty of Stone Age material to show they were here well before the Greeks or Romans began building. Take the Clovis point, a stone projectile point that dates to about 13,000 years ago. They’re unique to North America, and there are even variations within the U.S. But that’s not a building? Fair enough. Head to the St. Louis area, where you can find Cahokia Mounds. It’s what’s left of a city that covered six square miles at its peak in the 11th and 12th centuries. The largest mound on the site, Monks Mound, has a base approximately equal to the Great Pyramid of Giza. At its most populous, Cahokia had an estimated 15,300 people, with many more living in nearby communities. That may not sound large, but experts believe it could well have had more people than were in London or Paris at the time. It was the largest city north of Mexico until the 1780s, when Philadelphia’s population boomed. The real difference between the ruins you see in Europe and the ones you largely don’t in the U.S. comes down to building materials. Stones don’t rot like wood. So, absent large-scale efforts that physically change the landscape like Cahokia, most of us are not aware of what ancient communities here were doing. That changes in Mesoamerica, where the work was done in stone. You can still see and touch ancient structures. You realize the scale on which the people there were building because it’s far more obvious. Lack of obvious structures here doesn’t give us permission to be oblivious, though. Our nation is young. The land is not. And it’s a mistake to forget that people were doing very impressive things here long before Europeans realized it existed.