The Megaprojects That Even the Ancient Romans Couldn’t Pull Off: Rerouting the Tiber, Digging a Canal, and More

The Megaprojects That Even the Ancient Romans Couldn’t Pull Off: Rerouting the Tiber, Digging a Canal, and More Some would call the United States of America the mightiest empire the world has ever known. Yet over the past half-century or so, it has shown a strange inability to build domestic infrastructure, at least at the efficiency or on the scale seen elsewhere in the world. (This will not come as news to American enthusiasts of high-speed rail.) Here on Open Culture, we’ve previously featured history YouTuber Garrett Ryan’s take on the question of whether the U.S. is now declining like the ancient Roman Empire. On a more recent video for his channel Told in Stone, he’s highlighted the megaprojects that even the Romans — who managed the Pantheon, the Colosseum, and the Pont du Gard, to say nothing of their uniquely long-lasting concrete itself — couldn’t pull off. The Tiber may seem like a tame river today, but it wasn’t always so placid. In antiquity, rains caused it to flo