X @Nick Szabo

RT Archaeology & Art (@archaeologyart)By the mid nineteenth century the inside of the Colosseum functioned almost like a vertical botanical garden. When the English physician and amateur botanist Richard Deakin surveyed the ruin in the 1850s, he counted 420 different species sprouting from cracks, ledges and collapsed masonry, nearly doubling earlier Italian catalogues of the site. Some were familiar Mediterranean plants, but others were so uncommon that botanists struggled to explain how they had arrived, ...