🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: Nemi Ships: How Caligula's Floating Pleasure Palaces Were Found and Lost Again
Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science newsFor centuries, the medieval fishermen who sailed in the placid waters of Lake Nemi, 19 miles south of Rome, knew a secret. It was said that the rotting timbers of a gigantic ancient shipwreck lurked below the water’s quiet surface. But the lake was tiny, with an area of only 0.6 square miles.
It was only a matter of time, then, before the dictator’s attention turned to the mysterious ships at the bottom of Lake Nemi. In 1929, Mussolini ordered something unprecedented. The whole of Lake Nemi would be drained. Engineers reactivated an ancient Roman cistern that together with a modern pump reduced the lake’s water level by 65 feet. In the mud, slowly emerging from the waters, the Italian engineers found not one, but two enormous shipwrecks.
On these ships, Caligula was reported to hold parties where his wild and licentious appetites ran wild, with later historians repeating scurrilous and outlandish rumours about relationships with the wives of his generals and senators, and even with his own sisters.Until the discovery of the Nemi pleasure barges, it was thought that the Romans were incapable of building such large vessels.
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