Regio IX Liguria
About
The Diano Marina wreck sank about half a mile offshore in the mid-first century CE, its hold packed with Dressel 2/4 wine amphorae loaded in and around Roman Barcino, modern Barcelona. Part of its cargo also included massive dolia, ceramic vats holding roughly 3,000 liters apiece, stacked to carry wine in bulk rather than jar by jar. Divers found the wreck lying forty meters deep, and part of its amphora cargo is now on permanent display in Diano Marina's civic museum. It shows Catalonia already exporting wine westward across the Ligurian Sea two generations before Trajan's death.
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
Roman Maps shows the empire frozen at 11 August 117 CE, the day Trajan died — its moment of greatest territorial extent. Explore the full map →