Time Travel to Ancient Rome

A stop-motion tourist in Rome gets to travel 2,000 years back in time to see how the ancient Romans built Trajan’s Column. The Column is a tower constructed of 29 huge slabs of marble, with spiral stairs carved out of the inside of each slab. The engineering genius required to assemble such a tower was unprecedented.

This video was created by Hans Weise and Fernando Gomez-Baptista to accompany the National Geographic feature story on the mysterious Trajan’s Column in the April issue. If you’re more interested in the animation, here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how it was made. (Thanks, Marilyn Terrell!)