Centumcellae
About
A police patrol boat's sonar found this wreck in 2023 sitting 160 meters down off Civitavecchia, roughly eighty kilometers northwest of Rome, its hold still packed with hundreds of intact amphorae. Archaeologists dated the more-than-twenty-meter hull broadly to between the first century BCE and the first century CE based on the recovered amphorae. Italian authorities kept the exact coordinates secret after the discovery specifically to keep looters away from the intact site. The wreck marks the deep shipping lane that fed cargo up the Tyrrhenian coast toward Rome's harbors at Ostia and Portus.
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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