Continue reading on Substack<\/a>…<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sorry, this entry is only available in Italian.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pasqualerobustini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4798"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pasqualerobustini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pasqualerobustini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pasqualerobustini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pasqualerobustini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4798"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.pasqualerobustini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6711,"href":"https:\/\/www.pasqualerobustini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4798\/revisions\/6711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pasqualerobustini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pasqualerobustini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pasqualerobustini.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/a\/a4\/Sampietrini.jpg\/800px-Sampietrini.jpg\")
What’s so special about the “sampietrini”, those little square bricks typical of Rome’s old roads? The sampietrini have been used since the times of pope Sixtus V in the late 1500s but the name was invented later in 1725 after the new paving project of St. Peter’s square. “Hard as a sampietrino” is a common expression in Rome. Sampietrini are made of a hard and heavy volcanic rock. It is very interesting to a geologist: at first sight, you might confuse it with basalt; well, maybe a special kind of basalt. Actually, it is not correct to call it basalt. It is a rather rare rock around the world, although not in the Mediterranean area. But everything would be clearer if we knew more about the basalts themselves…<\/p>\n