Mazara del Vallo Wreck
About
A spearfisherman mistook this Republican-era wreck for a rock three nautical miles off Mazara del Vallo, at 46 meters down. Diver Giacomo De Mola, a spearfishing world champion, spotted it on his boat's sonar in August 2026, then dove down and found hundreds of Dressel 1A amphorae, the standard Italian wine jar of the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE, littering the seabed around two lead anchor stocks. Italy's culture minister, Alessandro Giuli, called it one of the most important underwater finds in years, and archaeologists have provisionally dated the wreck to between the 2nd and 1st centuries BCE.
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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