A Podcast about Rome. Episode 9: The Ships of Caligula at Lake Nemi.

The third of Rome’s emperors was Caligula: famously “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. Among the many extravagances of his short but indubitably extravagant reign were the floating palaces he had built on Lake Nemi, a crater of the quiescent volcanoes to the south-east of Rome.

Lake Nemi. July 2022

A project to raise these ships was first mooted in the fifteenth century, and was finally completed in the twentieth century barely a decade before the ships were destroyed in their museum during the Second World War.

Bronze lion with mooring ring from the Nemi ships. National Roman Museum, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme.

Mussolini observes the drainage of Lake Nemi. 20 October, 1928

The (larger) second ship emerges from the lake.

Lake Nemi, “the mirror of Diana”, March 2016 (This was taken at the end of a trip I organised for the Muriel Spark Society. Muriel Spark lived for a period at Nemi and her novel The Takeover is partially set by the eerie lake)