The third of Rome’s emperors was Caligula: famously “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Among the many extravagances of his short but indubitably extravagant reign were the floating palaces he had built on Lake Nemi, a crater of the quiescent volcanoes to the south-east of Rome.

A project to raise these ships was first mooted in the fifteenth century, and was finally completed in the twentieth century barely a decade before the ships were destroyed in their museum during the Second World War.

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