A luxurious and well-equipped villa belonging to the Roman coastal resort city of Stabiae boasts features that seem like something only found in the modern era.

According to Heritage Daily, it is a perfect water system serving a villa complex with a huge communal H๏τ bath, a large gym, and many other rooms requiring water, designed to rival the convenient water systems used in homes today.

This water pipe is… 2,000 years old

The system includes two main pipes connected to a central water tank located in an atrium, supplying water throughout the 2,500 square meter villa complex. Numerous intricate pipes regulate water flow into different rooms, with open/close valves no different from modern faucets and installed to allow easy regular maintenance.

The shocking fact is that this villa is at least 2,000 years old.

According to researchers from the Pompeii Archaeological Park in Italy, the villa complex was first excavated from 1757 to 1762, but research is still ongoing to this day.

It is just one villa among a long chain of luxurious estates belonging to the ancient Roman aristocracy in a small coastal city called Stabiae. Roman emperors like Julius Caesar, Augustus, and Tiberius also owned villas here.

Ancient Stabiae, now part of Naples province in Italy, was buried alongside the city of Pompeii and the nearby town of Herculaneum under thick volcanic ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

That disaster left behind the famous petrified “human statues” of Pompeii and buried numerous works showcasing the “timeless” civilization of the Romans.

This is not the first “time-traveling modern technology” discovered in these three buried cities. Previous finds have revealed astonishing scientific and technological advancements as well as an incredibly “modern” lifestyle of the Romans—for example, 2,000-year-old paved roads still in use, or a pedestrian street with roadside “takeaway” food stalls.

The ruins of a “modern” villa built more than 2,000 years ago, after hundreds of years of efforts to remove volcanic ash

Advanced water supply and drainage systems served the Romans’ love for relaxation in communal H๏τ baths and beautiful decorative fountains were also found here, but this new discovery takes their unbelievable sophistication to another level.