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Soldiers of the Italian army's bomb disposal unit pose proudly for Romebuddy.com's reporting cameraman as they near completion of the diffusion and removal of an unexploded WW2 bomb found beneath the tracks of a suburban commuter railway station on the outskirts of Rome.

This is not as unusual an occurence as it may sound. During World War 2, Rome was a key strategic target and under Nazi occupation for a while. Railway lines of supply to the city were frequently bombed. As much of Italy's ancient road and city fabric is only just now being modernised, the rebuilding of railway bridges over new wider roads often unearths these deadly old artefacts.
Three months later, construction workers on the same bridge found yet another bomb just a few yards away from the spot where this first one had lain.

The bomb was five feet down in the rubble, right next to the railway tracks, where thousands of commuters a day pass in heavy, rumbling trains to and from their jobs in central Rome and only fifty yards away from the station platform. God be thanked that it had never exploded in all this time.

Rush hour traffic had been diverted from the area and some three thousand occupants of town houses within a potential blast radius of half a mile were evacuated, yet your fearless Romebuddy reporter (who as you can imagine is simply that kind of idiot with nothing better to do) sneaked around the 'efficent' Italian police and army cordon to meet and congratulate the military heroes in person, and stand on the brink of the excavation crater to bring you this picture of the bomb itself.

(Yes, I want a medal please - Who else on the Internet brings you this kind of stuff about Rome?)

The bomb was live and was later transported by the army to a nearby field for controlled detonation, during which it blew a plume of three tons of earth eighty feet into the air.

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