A team of archaeologists has ‘sensationally’ discovered the ruins of a Roman gladiator school on the outskirts of the Austrian capital Vienna.
The find is one of the 100 hundred schools that the Romans built to train the fighters before they got involved in a brutal combat with each other.
The group from the Ludwig Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archaeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology in Vienna discovered the school, which contains sleeping cells, a bathing area and a training hall with heated floors and a cemetery.
The school, which is the only one of its type to have been discovered outside Italy, has been mapped by the use of ground penetrating radar, but the ruins still remain underground.
According to officials, the find can compete the famous Ludus Magnus — the largest of the gladiatorial training schools in Rome — in its structure.
Radar scans show that outside the walls of the school, what archaeologists believe was a cemetery for those killed during training.
"This is a world sensation, in the true meaning of the word,” the Daily Mail quoted lower Austrian provincial Governor Erwin Proell as saying. The team now hopes to unearth a wealth of artefacts, including body armour, weapons, eating utensils and money from the site where warriors trained and lived 2,000 years ago.
