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Caligula Mosaic From ‘Floating Palace’ Returns Home


guy

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A mosaic from Caligula's pleasure ship has been returned to its rightful place, the Roman Naval Museum near Lake Nemi, south of Rome.

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A New York antiquities dealer and her Italian journalist husband unknowingly used the mosaic — that once decorated Roman Emperor Caligula's ship — as a coffee table inside their Park Avenue apartment

Emperor's mosaic displayed in Italy after stint as NYC table

 

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A looted mosaic that once decorated a ship of the Roman Emperor Caligula and ended up as a coffee table in New York City finally returned home Thursday, as details emerged about the lucky break in the investigation that got it there.

Officials unveiled the mosaic at the Museum of Roman Ships in Italy, which was built in the 1930s specifically to house the treasures of two huge ceremonial ships Caligula commissioned in around AD 40. The ships eventually sank and were excavated from the depths of Lake Nemi, in the Alban hills south of Rome, starting in the late 1890s.

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“They were floating palaces,” whose “aquatic luxury” was doubtless impressed by a famed barge utilized by Anthony and Cleopatra on the Nile, mentioned Massimo Osanna, the director normal of Italy’s nationwide museums.

 

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/weird/roman-emperors-looted-mosaic-returned-home-after-being-used-as-nyc-coffee-table/2939733/

https://lenexweb.com/long-lost-mosaic-from-a-floating-palace-of-caligula-returns-home/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemi_ships

 

Summary: These ships, known as the Nemi ships, were finally recovered by Mussolini in 1929 from Lake Nemi after he literally drained the lake of water. They were part of his fascist propaganda campaign. Unfortunately, they were destroyed in World War II. Somehow a mosaic from the ship had been used as a decoration on a coffee table inside a New York City apartment. The mosaic now has returned to its place in a museum.

 

 

guy also known as gaius

 

 

Edited by guy
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