An Old Secret from the Stone Pavement of Milan's San Babila Dating Back to

The pavement you see today, subject to movement, under Benedictine Place in Milan, was first laid in 572. Yet, it was shifted again in the ninth century to form this piazza, atop a monastery built with repurposed stones from the same era. This shift, it seems, was not its last. The forum stones, part of the central square for the Roman city, could trace their lineage as far back as Augustus, the empire's initiator, who had built the Roman forum of Mediolanum in the 1st century.

The forum, an oriented towards the sun, was the city's heart, with a main street running from east to west, and a secondary north to south. Its dimensions were roughly 160 meters long and 55 meters wide. The surviving pavement you see now was unearthed during the construction of the 'Biblioteca Ambrosiana' in 1608, hidden within its basement. Remnants of red marble from Verona, originally part of the forum, were later moved to form this new pavement within the crypt of the library.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons