Road Construction

At home, in upstate New York, aside from school being out and grilling becoming popular, summer means road work. It is typical to see a road crew on every busy street at least one point in the summer in an effort to fix pot holes, repair pipelines that may have frozen etc. Today in Rome I saw a crew of three of four men doing "road work." Unlike at home where it is typical to see steamrollers, enormous dump trucks, and a crew of thirty to forty, here in Rome the crew had brooms, shovels, a wheelbarrow and a small van that was filled with sand. When I first came across the crew I wondered why such little equipment then i turned the corner and saw a pile of cobblestones and realized why. In order to repair anything under the surface of a street a crew has to first dig up several hundred cobble stones, repair what needs to be repaired and then manually replace each stone. The gaps are filled with sand and then pounded into place with a mechanical hammer to make certain they are secure. In this kind of heat I doubt the list of applicants for this job is very long.