Tivoli Travertine Quarries
About
Quarries in the sulfur-spring basins around Tivoli, 30 kilometers east of Rome, produced the porous limestone Romans called lapis Tiburtinus, known today as travertine. Workers floated cut blocks downstream on the Aniene River to building sites in the capital, where travertine faced the Colosseum's outer walls, rising roughly 48 meters above the arena floor. The stone was cut both from open pits and from underground galleries dug into the springs and basins where fresh travertine kept forming. These quarries have run almost without interruption for more than two thousand years and are still cut today for churches and monuments abroad.
What happened here
The rock is worked in benches from the top down, so that gravity does the moving. Channels are cut around a block with a pick, then it is split from the bed with iron wedges driven into a line of holes, sometimes with wooden wedges soaked to swell. Blocks are dressed roughly on the spot — no one hauls waste — and marked with the quarry, the gang, the date and the consular year, which is how the empire keeps track of what it owns. Sledges, rollers and ox teams take them to a river or the sea, because moving stone overland is the expensive part. Fine marbles are imperial monopolies. Abandoned faces still show the last unfinished cut, stopped mid-job and never resumed.
Sources
Nearby
.jpg?width=800)
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →