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The coffee table of Caligula, one of the most infamous Roman emperors of all time, has quite the history – and its ancient creation is only the beginning. After being lost in a lake for two millennia, more than one dictator owned the table since it came back to the surface. However, even stranger is how it ended up inside Park Avenue apartment! Read on to find out more…
Caligula Coffee Table – A Rough History
60 Minutes/YouTube
While this story begins in the ancient Roman empire, its ending began in 2013. That’s when Dario Del Buffalo, an Italian expert in stone art from the Roman era, went on a book tour, promoting his most recent tome, Porohyry. While signing copies of his book inside a jewelry store in New York, Del Buffalo overhead the most peculiar conversation…
“There was a lady, with a young guy with a strange hat, that came to the table and told her ‘What a beautiful book, and oh! Helen look, that’s your mosaic!'” Del Buffalo recently recounted in an interview with 60 Minutes. “And she said, ‘Yes that’s my mosaic,’ so I finished my last signature and I went after them.”
From there, things only got stranger and stranger! “I saw the young guy and I said, ‘Excuse me you were talking about the mosaic on my book, can you tell me is this the mosaic you were talking about?'” Del Buffalo continued. “‘Yes this is the mosaic Helen has in her house on Park Avenue!'” The Roman stone art expert could hardly believe his years. This was a one-in-a-million chance, but Del Buffalo had to follow through. If this woman was telling the truth, Helen’s mosaic might have originally belonged to the infamous Roman emperor, Caligula. And it turns out – she was telling the truth!
The surprised author described it as a one-in-a-million chance, and as much as he felt sorry to do so, he had to report it to the Italian consulate authorities, sure as Del Buffalo was that Helen’s mosaic belonged originally to Caligula, who put it on his giant boats.
An Innocent Purchase
60 Minutes/YouTube
For those who don’t know, infamous Emperor Caligula had “pleasure barges” built, where he could engage in some of his more base desires. These massive boats were essentially enormous Iron-Age yachts. On one of these boats was a beautiful mosaic coffee table, one of Caligula’s favorites. However, the boats eventually sank to the bottom of Lake Nemi, located just outside of Rome. There, the vessels remained until Benito Mussolini drained the lake in 1920. What happens next sounds like something out of a movie…
Mussolini then moved the coffee table to the Museum of the Roman Boats, completed in the 1930s. However, during World War II, the table was stolen by the Nazis, who wanted it for Hitler’s personal collection. Then at some point after World War II, the table disappeared. Del Buffalo never thought anyone would find it, so he included a picture of the coffee table in his book. However, it turned up in a New York apartment!
Helen Fioratti, the mosaic’s former owner, said that she bought the table from “an aristocratic Italian police official with a well-established reputation for recovering lost art stolen by the Nazis.” While purchasing the table was technically a crime, Italian police have elected not to charge Fioratti, as she did so unknowingly. “It was an innocent purchase,” Fioratti explained to the Associated Press. “We were very happy with it. We loved it. We had it for years and years, and people always complimented us on it.”
Now, the mosaic is back where it belongs, in the Museum of the Roman Boats, where it will be protected and displayed for generations!
