 In "L'America dimenticata", Russo suggests that the Americas were known to some European civilizations in ancient times, probably discovered by the Phoenicians or the Carthaginians, but that the knowledge was lost under Roman expansion in the second century BC.Russo notes paintings dating to the Roman period and representing American fruits ("Ananas"), and small Mesoamerican toys representing wheeled trucks, when the wheel had not been invented nor used in pre-Columbian times.With the collapse of the Hellenistic world under the attacks of the Romans around the middle of the 2nd century BC (specifically, the destruction of Corinth and Carthage in 146 BC and the expulsion of the scientific elite from Alexandria in 145 BC), these geographic notions were lost.