Free Republic

A 2,000-year-old artifact that had ended up in the home of a Manhattan antiquities dealer is now in an Italian museum....It was crafted in the first century for the deck of one of two spectacularly decorated ships on Lake Nemi that the Emperor Caligula commissioned as floating palaces. Recovered from underwater wreckage in 1895, the mosaic was later lost for decades, only to re-emerge several years ago as a coffee table in the living room of a Manhattan antiques dealer...Caligula’s rule only lasted from A.D. 37 to 41, but he enthusiastically embraced the trappings of the position, including an opulent...

Nineteen centuries of foundered orgy looked up at the hydroairplane which last week waltzed high over Lake Nemi in the Alban hills back of Rome. And Giuseppe Cultrera, Etruscan scholar in the plane,* looked down from the vantage of his flying height through Nemi's waters and could see what none but groping divers theretofore had seen—the sunken Golden Barge whereon epileptic Emperor Caligula, great-grandson of Augustus, and his minions held their carouses.