Many people are interested in the new exhibition highlighting the 4ft by 4 ft restituted Caligula's ship opus sectile floor fragment which was identified with a Park Avenue art dealer in New York in 2013. And thanks to the efforts of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office and the Carabinieri TPC the object was recovered in 2017 and is back on display now its home museum.  Unfortunately, there is also a significant amount of contradictory information flying about in the newspapers about this object's passage through history and the circumstances surrounding its theft.  With that in mind, I have tried to outline here only the verified details relating to this unique artefact as we still don't have all the answers.

Two things to note, first, we will update this page as we have confirmatory details from confirmed sources, so check back from time to time.  Secondly, much of the plunder described in this post occurred during times when and where it should be emphasized that anyone who had enough money and manpower, was free to legally plunder the relics of Italy in given circumstances.  This is why so little material remains from the grand ships of one of Rome's best-known villains.  

But let's start with the beginning... 

Portrait of Caligula

Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, the son of general Germanicus and Agrippina the Elder is named Rome's third emperor in succession after Tiberius and ruled for a period of three years and ten months.  Throughout history, he would come to be known as Caligula, a childhood nickname bestowed on him by his father's soldiers, derived from the hobnailed sandal boots soldiers and Caligula wore during his father's military campaigns. 

Sometime during his reign, Caligula commissioned the construction of several extravagant vessels, two of which archaeology tells us were piloted on the Speculum Dianae, the Mirror Of Diana, one of two lakes formed in the confines of a dormant caldera up in the Alban Hills a short distance from Rome.

Important to Roman history, the Alban Hills are reputed to be the birthplace of Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome.  Given its significance and location, emperors and wealthy Romans built grand villas there, many of which once dotted the body of water we know as Lake Nemi.  An important temple to Diana is also situated here. 

Caligula's Lake Nemi vessels were constructed using the Vitruvian method and were roughly the length of a Boeing 747.  

They have often been referred to simply as:

The exact purpose and eventual use of the two vessels has long been the subject of speculation by scholars, historians, treasure and truth seekers.  Each complicated by the paucity of first-hand sources on Caligula's reign. 

The bulk of what we know about this infamous ruler comes from Suetonius, who described Caligula's rule unflatteringly and short-lived rule with significant bias, some 80 years after his death.  Further writings, by Cassius Dio, were written even later, almost two centuries after Caligula's dramatic death, making it difficult to disentangle dramatised storytelling from historic facts.

But in his writing Seutonius does describe two other ships built for Caligula saying:

It is improbably that the two stylistically diverse vessels Caligula placed on Lake Nemi are the same Seutonius described further south in Campania but the writer's descriptions of their use and the remains recovered from each of these vessels documents ships of similar grandeur.  During the early days of the discovery of the ships beneath Lake Nemi, it was thought is that one of the two Lazio lake vessels was used as a floating temple either to the Roman goddess Diana, given her temple beside the lake.  Another theory surmised that one was used to honour Isis during the festival of Isidis Navigium, a ritual dedicated to her role as protector of sailors.  

Given the grandeur of their size, and the artefacts that have been documented as being salvaged from them, it is believed that the second ship served as a grand and floating palace fit for an emperor known for his exaggerated extravagance.

No written records document precisely when, or under what circumstances, Caligula's two lake vessels sank following his assassination.  Some say the vessels may have been deliberately sunk by order of Caligula’s successor Claudius, a more benign and prudent ruler who came to power unexpectedly after the assassination of his nephew. Others speculate that the vessels simply floated on the lake abandoned until they eventually sank of their own accord after their outer lead sheathing become waterlogged.  

Whichever is the case, Prima Nave and Seconda Nave lay silently preserved, not far from one another, on the muddy bottom of the Speculum Dianae for over nineteen hundred years.  The first vessel at a depth stretching from five to fifteen metres, given the inverted conical shape of the dormant volcano. The second, at a right angle to the first, in slightly deeper water, at twenty metres beneath the lake's surface. 

After fishermen brought him pieces of timber they had fished from Lake Nemi,  Cardinal Prospero Colonna, the nephew of Pope Martin V, and the Lord of the castles of Genzano and Nemi as well as the land and the lake, became intrigued.  He commissioned Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti to organize an attempt a recovery the first of the vessels at Nemi. At the time, and without confirmatory historic details, the ship was believed to have been placed on the lake during the reign of Caligula's predecessor, Tiberius Caesar Augustus, the second Roman emperor.

In setting about his recovery operations Alberti, one of the most experienced hydraulic engineers of his time, created a floating retrieval platform above the Prima Nave, constructed his extraction platform from empty barrels for pontoons and windlasses.  

Using mounting winches with hawsers and grappling hooks, the architect then attempted to hoist Primo Nave ashore. But with material installed above the lake's surface was wholly inadequate for the job and Alberti's attempts failed. The embedded ship remained firmly on the lake's bottom firmly in the grip of Nemi's thick muddy silt.  Disastrously, this first attempt at salvage ripped away a section of the prow as well as planks from the ship's bow.

In concluding their campaign Alberti's diving crew salvaged only a few remains, mostly marble fragments, bronze nails, and plates of lead tacked on the ships exterior to reinforce the hull.  But a few of the pieces recovered turned out to be very important.  Those were portions of three lead water pipes (fistulae), their use not yet understood. Despite the questions about their use, each of these simple pipes did more to date the vessel than any recovered masonry brick stamp or architectural element as stamped on each, were the words property of Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus:

Despite failing to raise the vessel, the undertaking caused such a spectacle that even the grand ladies of the Pontifical Court came out to inspect the progress of Alberti's men, sometimes even carrying off small mementoes from the scraps the workmen recovered, which were then taken back to Rome, most eventually lost to time.

Nearly a century later, and more than 150 years before the invention of the modern diving bell, a second attempt to raise one of Caligula's vessels in Lake Nemi, was attempted.  This time utilizing the earliest recorded employment of a breathing apparatus in underwater archaeology. 

For the second attempt inventor, Guglielmo de Lorena created an improvised contrivance using a weighted wooden box that reached the waist of military engineer Francesco de' Marchi, allowing him to breath for short periods underwater.  Once submerged de' Marchi attempted to survey the length of the emperor's vessels, though his observations were met with limited success, impeded by the distortion of the glass window on the inventor's diving box.

Ultimately, like Alberti's efforts before him, de' Marchi attempts to hoist Prima Nave up and out of Lake Nemi's mud with ropes and winches failed. And his salvage attempts inflicted further damage to the ancient vessel, nibbling away like the fishes,  at more sections of the ship's skeleton.  In addition to that, de' Marchi's cumulative diving sessions impacted his body, as his experimental time underwater caused his nose, mouth, and ears to bleed from the barotrauma of his explorations.

Unable to raise the ship, their only rewards for their exploits, aside from de' Marchi's descriptive, if embellished, tale of his historic adventure, was the retrieval of a grouping of artefacts manually salvaged using a windlass working from a raft floating above.  Their haul is described as having been "two mule-loads" of material, brought to the surface after multiple dives of a cumulative duration of many hours.  

The motivating factor for this exploration and most subsequent attempts at salvage on Caligula's ships, before the final success, was not archaeological in nature.  The higher priority for the people involved was finding treasure for profit, rather than exploration. 

de' Marchi's salvage operation is known to have brought up portions of the ship's two feet square pavement tiles, segments of red marble, more lead piping, nails and lead sheathing.  As with the first attempt, gawkers too, wanted their own bits of the ancient past and history records that scavengers at one point broke into de' Marchi's home in order to steal bits and bobs recovered during the second exploration. 

Using grappling hooks and other devices, local "entrepreneurs" continued to extract remnants from the ships, selling the pieces fished from the lake willy nilly, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the tradition of the ‘Grand Tour’ as part of one's aristocratic education become popular among wealthy European gentlemen.

Almost three centuries after the last attempted salvage, a third attempt to raise Prima Nave was conducted by Annesio Fusconi, an engineer, who used a large, eight-person Edmond Halley style diving-bell.  This device replenished the air for the submerged divers with air carried in casks. 

To increase the spectacle of the salvage exploration, Fusconi built a viewing stage, complete with a bridge where illustrious invited guests of Roman and foreign nobility, as well as the diplomatic corps, could be entertained by the workmens' performance. 

Like with the previous two attempts, the third team used a floating platform, this time content with possibly dismantling the Prima Nave, rather than hoisting the ship up whole.  Their plan called for pulling smaller sections of the hull to the surface.  Thankfully, however, Fusconi's ropes failed and bad weather intervened.  The ships, more or less, after years of sporadic scavenging, remained more or less intact, below the lake's surface.

Fusconi catalogued the material he salvaged in his memoirs, giving a precise list of what he recovered, some of which included:

"two rounds of pavement, one of oriental porphyry and the other of serpentine, pieces of marble of various qualities, enamels, mosaics, fragments of metal columns, bricks, nails, terracotta pipes and finally wooden beams and boards". 

The major finds Fusconi extracted were purchased by Cardinal Camerlengo for the Vatican Museums; though some rare pieces were also kept by Fusconi himself, and were said to have been placed in a warehouse of one of the palaces of the Prince Alessandro Torlonia who it can be assumed, purchased at least a portion of what remained from this recovery campaign.  

Some of these finds were repurposed to suit the whims of Prince Torlonia and were once proudly displayed in Palazzo Bolognetti-Torlonia at Piazza Venezia in Rome.  There, he had several furnishings built with wood recovered during the 1827 salvage, including a gothic style cabinet.  His workmen also lay down flooring using some of the terracotta recovered from Nemorense ships. 

Yet despite the advances in this salvage operation, the only portable remnants recovered by the state from this third attempt is a single beam fragment with nails, absent its documented golden head. 

Many other wooden beams and boards were lost to us, inconsequential in size, they are believed to have been widdled into souvenir smoking pipes, or used to make snuffboxes, secretaries, and travel boxes. What wood that was recovered and not repurposed was eventually stolen when work was suspended for the season.  To add insult to injury, thieves even made off with the Halley diving apparatus, perhaps hoping to use the device themselves in search of their own treasure.

On behalf of the Orsini family, who now controlled the territory in and around the lake, and with the authorization of unified Italy's Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, a fourth and slightly more systematic study of the wrecks was undertaken, directed by the antiquarian Eliseo Borghi.  With a bit of ingenuity, involving Lieutenant Colonel Vittorio Malfatti and an expert diver, whose name is now lost to us, the crew systematically attached long cords along the contours of the two galleys topped with small cork buoys. This allowed a surface level outline of each of the vessels showing exactly where they came to rest below the lake's surface.  The divers' corks also provided a more accurate means of measuring the width and length of each of the extravagant vessels. 

While undertaking their explorations, the team also documented that the decks of one of the ships had been paved with opus sectile in Egyptian red porphyry, green serpentine porphyry from Sparta, and Rosso Antico from Greece, defining when the stolen opus sectile fragment was originally found.  They also determined that the bulwarks had been cast in solid bronze and at one point were probably gilded.  It is during this operation that for at least the first time, some of the vessels' artefacts made it into museums, including an important bronze ferrule depicting the head of a lion holding a mooring ring in its jaws believed to have once adorned one of the steering oars.  

Working the salvage, divers brought up the ship's famous bronze proteomes as well as the portions of the ship's opus sectile flooring, including the fragment that made its way illegally to New York.  Other artefacts recovered include more lead pipes, ball bearings, floorboards, hinges, bronze threads, gilded bronze roof tiles, gilt copper tiles, bricks of various shapes and sizes, and fragments of mosaics with glass paste embellishments.

Talks begin for another attempt at the recovery of the vessels at Lake Nemi.  An engineering commission is formed and entrusted to Corrado Ricci. After careful analysis, Vittorio Malfatti a participant of the 1895 salvage, proposes a fifth and final attempt, centering on a completely new technique, partially emptying the lake in order to lay bare the two submerged vessels allowing the hulls to be dug out of the mud. 

Work begins at Lake Nemi under the orders of Benito Mussolini in what would become at the time, perhaps the greatest underwater archaeological recovery ever accomplished.

Workmen set about emptying Lake Nemi.  The original proposal had been to dig a channel that would redirect the waters of Lake Nemi into nearby Lake Albano, which lay at a lower level.  As the project got underway, it was decided instead to bore a tunnel, some 1,653 meters in length through hard volcanic rock and then grafting the newly created tunnel to a preexisting 6 BCE emissary older than the ships themselves.  If their engineering plan was valid, and provided they could safely clear all the debris from landslides crowding into the ancient flood control channel, the engineers could divert the lake's water all the way through the Arcia valley and into the Mediterranean sea 30 kilometres away.

By the end of December, five million cubic meters of water had been extracted from Lake Nemi, half of what was needed for the emergence of the stern of Prima Nave. 

As the pumping continued, the Seconda Nave broke the surface.  70 meters long and over 20 wide, it was adorned richly with marble floors as well as objects related to the cult of Isis.

Primo Nave is towed on a specially constructed roller system inside the partially completed Museo della Navi di Nemi.

With the facade of the museum still unfinished, the second ship is installed inside the future Museo della Navi di Nemi. 

The opus sectile floor fragment from Caligula's ship and many of the other historic artefacts recovered from the two vessels are moved into the newly completed Museo della Navi di Nemi shortly before its 21 April 1940 inauguration by Benito Mussolini.

 

The incorrect year that many newspapers say dates the last known photo of the stolen opus sectile floor fragment from Caligula's ship.

Date range given in various newspaper statements as the period when the opus sectile floor fragment from Caligula's ship was purchased. Art and antique dealer Helen Fioratti has reported that she and her husband Nereo Fioratti, a foreign press correspondent and journalist with Italy’s newspaper Il Tempo, purchased the artefact from an aristocratic Roman family, sometimes reported as the Barberini family in some news accounts.  In other differing articles Helen Fioratti claimed that the couple innocently purchased the artefact from "an Italian art historian" or an "Italian police official..." known for his work recovering art stolen by the Nazis.

Assuming Fioratti is referring to Rodolfo Siviero, I have found no evidence to support her statement.  

The opus sectile floor fragment from Caligula's ship is taken out of Italy and imported into the U.S. How the Fiorattis arranged for its transport to their New York Park Avenue apartment is unknown.

The opus sectile floor fragment from Caligula's ship resurfaced when it was purchased by the antique dealer Helen Fioratti and her husband Nereo Fioratti, a foreign press correspondent and journalist with Italy’s newspaper Il Tempo. They said they bought the piece in good faith from an aristocratic family and used it as a coffee table for years.

The Park Avenue home of Helen Fioratti is featured in Architectural Digest, but despite being photographed, the opus sectile floor fragment from Caligula's ship is not immediately identified by law enforcement authorities.