Carabinieri Divers Rediscover Roman Wine Amphorae Off Camogli, 67 Years After They Were First Reported

Several are embedded in the rock and covered by coral-like concretions, which made them hard to identify. Two exposed amphorae were removed to protect them, because the area is open to theft. Divernet notes that a date between the late second and early first centuries BC has been cited for this type of amphora, which would make the site more than 2,000 years old. No hull has been found, and archaeologists say further work is needed to establish the extent of the site and whether timbers survive under sediment or rock.

What happened to the 1959 discovery?

In November 1959 Duilio Marcante, a pioneer of Italian scuba diving, reported amphorae wedged between rocks at Punta Chiappa to the regional antiquities authorities. Finestre sull'Arte says he and the Carabinieri diving unit located two and that a possible pile at the base of the cliff was hidden by mud. In May 1960 a team led by Gianni Roghi, working with Nino Lamboglia's underwater archaeology centre at Albenga, returned and could not find the main concentration. They did find an amphora tied with thin rope, which looked prepared for theft.

Lamboglia presented the case at a conference in Barcelona in 1961, giving the depth as about 45 metres. After that the site disappears from survey records. Divernet says STAS describes the link between this week's find and Marcante's as an archaeological hypothesis, not a confirmed identification.

Why is protecting the site hard?

The Superintendency considers constant monitoring and regulated diving necessary to guard the amphorae against visitors and illegal removal, Finestre sull'Arte reports. That is the long-running tension of wrecks in busy dive waters: the same accessibility that lets archaeologists work lets looters in, which is exactly what Lamboglia suspected in 1960.

This is journalism, not instruction. Dives at this depth are the work of specialist teams, and anyone who wants to train for them should do so with a certified instructor and a recognised agency. What happens next is for the archaeologists: confirming the identification, mapping the cargo and deciding what a site like this should look like when divers are allowed back.