The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture, their amphitheaters, for wild beasts to fight in.
The reason the Romans built their great paved highways was because they had such inconvenient footwear.
If there is one country and its people that have contributed most to western civilisation's man-made world continuously for the last 2000 years, it must surely be Italy.
Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.
The imperial vastness of late Roman architecture was made possible by the invention of concrete.
The Romans spent the next 200 years using their great engineering skill to construct ruins all over Europe.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
Pompeii is taught at schools in England, and, for a young boy, the combination of the Roman Empire and a volcano was irresistible.
The Romans were not inventors of the supporting arch, but its extended use in vaults and intersecting barrel shapes and domes is theirs.
