Cala Cicala Wreck
About
A Roman stone-carrier went down in six meters of water off Capo Colonna near Crotone, its hold loaded with 36 marble blocks and pillars weighing about 180 tons combined. Researchers from the University of Calabria traced the stone in 2017 to the Aliki and Vathy quarries on the Greek island of Thasos. Some monoliths ran longer than six meters, evidence of a heavy coastal stone trade running up Italy's Ionian shore.
What happened here
A merchantman goes down with everything aboard and the sea keeps most of it. Cargo is usually amphorae — wine, oil, fish sauce — stacked in layers in sand, or roof tiles, or marble in the round, or ingots stamped with the smelter's name. Timbers survive where the mud or the cargo covers them, and the hull shows how it was built: planks edge-joined with mortise and tenon before the frames go in, a way of building that is slow, strong and about to be abandoned. Personal things come up too — a cooking pot, a lamp, coins that date the last voyage to within a few years. Most losses happen in autumn, close inshore, on a coast the crew knew.
Sources
Nearby
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