NEMI, ITALY—For the last four years, Italian antiquity restorers have been trying to remove tea and coffee stains from a large 2,000-year-old mosaic tile that graced the floor of Emperor Caligula’s palatial orgy ship. The 4.5-foot square mosaic made of red porphyry and green and white glass and marble had ended up in the posh Park Avenue living room of Italian-Americans Nereo Fioratti, a journalist with Italy’s newspaper Il Tempo and his art collector wife Helen Fioratti, who was apparently no great fan of coasters.
The orgy ship mosaic’s journey from Italy to New York and back to Italy where it was unveiled on Thursday began on the floor of Lake Nemi outside of Rome. Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was so enamored with Caligula—known as much for sleeping with his sisters and wives of his allies as for cutting out the tongues of his naysayers and naming his horse as a consul—that he drained the lake and fished two of the emperor’s party cruisers off the muddy floor in the late 1920s and built a museum on the shoreline to house their riches. The orgy ships were sunk when Caligula was assassinated in 41 A.D.
The museum, which was used as a bomb shelter during World War II, was torched by retreating Nazis, but by then Caligula’s orgy ship mosaic was already gone.
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A third party ship is the object of great intrigue, and Nemi’s mayor said they are using high-tech sonar to see if they can locate it under centuries of mud and silt. The ships were not meant for navigation but were stationary in the lake, which intrigued Caligula because of its association to the Roman goddess Diana, held in high esteem by the emperor.
The last known photo of the mosaic was taken in 1955 and ended up in a book by Dario Del Bufalo, an Italian expert on ancient marbles. The mosaic was considered stolen since its whereabouts had not been officially known for more than half a century. Del Bufalo, who attended Thursday’s unveiling in Nemi, recalled presenting his book, which featured a photo of the mosaic, to art experts in Manhattan in 2013. “I was sitting there signing books and suddenly people started saying, ‘Oh look, isn’t that Helen’s coffee table?’ when they got to the photo of Caligula’s lost mosaic,” he told The Daily Beast. “It wasn’t just one person, but it seemed everyone had seen the table.” In fact, Fioratti’s famous coffee table was featured in a photo spread in Architectural Digest and thus had become the envy of the elite New York City collector set.
As luck would have it, an Italian art theft official with Italy’s elite Carabinieri Art Squad had also attended Del Bufalo’s talk and overheard the attendees gushing that the Fiorattis’ coffee table was now at the center of international intrigue. The Fiorattis’ details were given to the police who then started an investigation that eventually led to the sequestering of the mosaic but not to any charges against Fioratti who assured police that she had obtained the mosaic in good faith in the 1960s. She said they bought it from an Italian aristocratic family in a deal brokered by none other than a member of Italy’s art theft police squad.
“It was an innocent purchase,” she told The New York Times in 2017. “It was our favorite piece and we had it for 45 years.”
Italy’s National Museum Director Massimo Osanna said that the mosaic had apparently been smuggled out of Italy to the U.S. in a diplomatic pouch, though no receipt of purchase or import papers have ever been coughed up. Until the mid-2000s, it was common for Italian art to show up in museums around the world. Marion True, then curator of the Getty Museum of Los Angeles, stood trial in Italy for nearly a decade for allegedly selling art stolen by tomb raiders in Italy’s vast archeological parks to collectors and museums. Hundreds of pieces of such stolen art have been returned to Italy in recent years.
But it took four years for Italian authorities working with Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance to verify that it was the original orgy ship mosaic. Fioratti said that she would not fight the sequester, and that in fact she should be rewarded for taking such good care of it. “I felt bad they took her table,” Del Bufalo told The Daily Beast. “She really loved it.”
Vance said in a statement announcing the authenticity of the orgy ship mosaic, “These items may be beautiful, storied, and immensely valuable to collectors, but willfully disregarding the provenance of an item is effectively offering tacit approval of a harmful practice that is, fundamentally, criminal.” Fioratti, who is now in her 90s, has never been charged with any crimes though several search warrants of her home on Park Avenue and antiquities studio L’Antiquaire & The Connoisseur suggest authorities were certainly suspicious.
The mosaic was returned to Italy in 2017 with a cache of other looted art but only unveiled on Thursday at the new naval museum that the directors say will one day feature a lifesize recreation of the orgy ships.
It has taken nearly four years to remove what Italy’s National Museum Director Massimo Osanna said were “remnants of domestic life” including coffee and tea stains, which contain tannin that easily stains natural stone. The Fiorattis also used it for flower vases and cocktail tumblers, which left calcium markings from the water. “It was clearly a well used table,” Osanna said. “It is really a miracle it has made it back to Lake Nemi.”
