Free Diver Finds 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shipwreck Packed With Cargo Off Sicily

A free diver swimming off the coast of Sicily has discovered an ancient Roman shipwreck still loaded with hundreds of ceramic jars, believed to be more than 2,000 years old. Giacomo De Mola spotted the wreck on the seabed, its cargo largely intact — a rare survival for a vessel that sank two millennia ago The Independent.

The ship was carrying amphorae, the two-handled ceramic jars used across the ancient Mediterranean to transport wine, oil and grain. Hundreds of them remain packed in the wreck, well-preserved by the conditions on the sea floor BBC News. The discovery was reported on 9 August 2026, and Artnews confirmed the find of ancient ceramic vessels at the site the following day Artnews.

Sicily's waters are dense with such finds. The Gela I shipwreck, discovered off the Sicilian coast in 1988, was a commercial vessel carrying Attic ceramics, transport amphorae, bronze artefacts and rare orichalcum ingots — a golden-coloured brass alloy prized in antiquity. Another Sicilian wreck was first spotted in 1971, when a local fisherman noticed ancient ceramics tangled in his net. The region's underwater heritage is extensive enough to fill its own institution: the Museo dei relitti greci, or Museum of Greek Shipwrecks, opened in Gela in February 2026 to house an ancient ship recovered from the seabed.

The Soprintendenza Nazionale per il Patrimonio Culturale Subacqueo — Italy's national authority for underwater cultural heritage — oversees much of this work. Its Soprintendente, Barbara Davidde, is an underwater archaeologist who has personally participated in the excavation of a Roman imperial-era merchant shipwreck at Santa, on Sicily's coast.

What makes the latest find striking is the combination of accessibility and preservation. De Mola was free diving — no scuba tanks, no deep-water submersible — when he came across a vessel still carrying the cargo it loaded in a Roman port more than two thousand years ago. For archaeologists, an undisturbed cargo is the closest thing to a sealed time capsule: the jars and their arrangement can reveal what the ship carried, where it was bound, and how trade moved across the Roman world.

The discovery adds to a coastline that has been yielding up its wrecks for decades, each one a fragment of the same commercial network that once connected Sicily to the wider Mediterranean.