A Roman amphora resurfaces at Punta Chiappa, in the Portofino Marine Protected Area

During a training exercise, the Genoa Underwater Carabinieri Unit located an intact Dressel 1 type Roman amphora at a depth of over forty metres, in the waters of the Portofino Marine Protected Area, off Punta Chiappa, near Camogli.

The news currently comes from a single source - the reconstruction based on the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage and the Liguria Superintendency - and no further independent confirmation of the details of the find is available.

The Superintendency described the rediscovery as an almost forgotten dossier, emphasising how much underwater archaeological research can still achieve even in areas considered well studied:

“reopens an almost forgotten dossier” — Liguria Superintendency, protection authority

The find is part of the routine activity of the Carabinieri Underwater Service, established in 1953, which works permanently with the Superintendencies and with the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage to identify and protect submerged archaeological sites along the Italian coasts.

The Dressel 1 form, widespread in Roman-era maritime trade, is a type of amphora already known to underwater archaeologists and used as a chronological reference to date wrecks and submerged deposits. Its discovery at a depth of over forty metres, in a protected marine area already subject to study, confirms, according to the Superintendency, that significant portions of the Italian seabed remain to be explored even where research seemed by now well established.

The Genoa Underwater Carabinieri Unit did not provide, in the available excerpts, information on any possible recovery operations or on a more precise dating of the find. The matter therefore remains open to future updates, which the Liguria Superintendency will have to communicate through the competent institutional channels.

The Punta Chiappa case adds to a series of underwater finds along the Ligurian coast, an area historically crossed by Roman trade routes between the peninsula and Gaul. The involvement of the Carabinieri Command for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, a structure dedicated to the protection of archaeological assets including submerged ones, signals institutional interest in a site that the Superintendency considers far from exhausted.