Museum of the Roman Ships
Museum of the Roman Ships site features
Last updated on October 8, 2026The museum
The museum stands on the shore of Lake Nemi, below the towns on the crater rim, and it is shaped by what it was built to contain. Two great halls were raised to hold two hulls, the larger of them 73 metres long with a beam of 24 metres and the other 70 by 20 -- so the building is a pair of sheds on the scale of the ships, and it has been empty of them since 1944.
The frontage is a long brick-red wall with the name cut across it in Roman capitals, broken by tall arched glazing at each end where the hall roofs rise. The approach is a wide apron of paving between the road and the doors, with the wooded crater wall climbing behind. Inside, the visit runs about an hour.
What the halls hold now is the record rather than the thing: photographs, the drawings made for the Italian Navy survey and by the archaeologist G. Gatti, the original pieces recovered from the lake between 1895 and 1932, and the forward section of a full-size replica of the first ship, built at Torre del Greco and brought here in 2001.
Key highlights
The two halls
Built to hold the ships raised in -- the larger 73 metres long with a 24-metre beam, the second 70 by 20 -- and sized accordingly. They are the clearest surviving statement of how big the vessels were.
The replica's bow
Funded by the town council of Nemi from , built in the Torre del Greco shipyards and completed in , then brought to the museum for the rest of the vessel to be built around it. Project Diana planned a full-size reconstruction of the prima nave to deck level only, since no record survives of the shape and size of the buildings and temples that stood on the deck. The association's last press release was in 2004 and its website was deleted in 2011.
The original pieces
Individual fragments recovered from Lake Nemi between 1895 and 1932 -- the material that was already out of the water before the hulls were, and is therefore the only part of the ships that did not burn.
The survey drawings
Photographs, the drawings made for the Italian Navy survey and those by the archaeologist G. Gatti survived the fire, and they are the reason reconstruction was possible at all. Without them 1944 would have erased the ships completely rather than only physically.