From a tyrannical Roman emperor’s pleasure boat to a Manhattan apartment coffee table,
this mosaic has gone on quite the adventure.
ERNESTO RUSCIO/GETTY IMAGES
In 2018, at a Goodwill store in Austin, Texas, a marble bust of a dour-looking man caught antique dealer Laura Young’s eye. She liked the look of him and bought the bust for $34.99, dubbing it “Dennis” after the self-obsessed character Dennis Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Young guessed the statue was old, but never imagined it was a 2,000-year-old original. A Greek sculpture expert at Sotheby’s deduced that Dennis was actually a Roman bust of Germanicus, father of infamous madman Caligula.
A Mosaic From Caligula’s Ceremonial Ship, Turned Into a Coffee Table (image above)
The striking piece sat in a Manhattan apartment for decades, until the Italian military police’s Art Recovery Unit showed up.
Antique dealer Helen Fioratti had no idea the mosaic that sat in her Upper East Side apartment had been dredged up from a mysterious Roman barge in Lake Nemi, Italy. After buying the red-and-green mosaic in Europe, Fioratti spent thousands of dollars shipping it home to New York and converting it into a coffee table. For 45 years, the table sat as a beloved accent piece, garnering many compliments from visitors, Fioratti told The Associated Press.
But that wasn’t all: Young learned the bust had been stolen during World War II. Most likely a G.I. looted the bust in Germany and brought it back to the United States, where it eventually ended up at Goodwill. Young was determined to return it to Germany, but sorting everything out would take years. Now, after a brief stint at the San Antonio Museum of Art, Dennis is finally set to return home in 2023.
It’s quite the story, but finding hidden treasures in surprising places isn’t as rare as you might imagine. Here at Atlas Obscura we love these kinds of stories. So in honor of the return of Dennis, we went digging through the archives to uncover some other stories of priceless artifacts discovered in unusual places.
It’s quite the story, but finding hidden treasures in surprising places isn’t as rare as you might imagine. Here at Atlas Obscura we love these kinds of stories. So in honor of the return of Dennis, we went digging through the archives to uncover some other stories of priceless artifacts discovered in unusual places.
A Mosaic From Caligula’s Ceremonial Ship, Turned Into a Coffee Table (image above)
The striking piece sat in a Manhattan apartment for decades, until the Italian military police’s Art Recovery Unit showed up.
Antique dealer Helen Fioratti had no idea the mosaic that sat in her Upper East Side apartment had been dredged up from a mysterious Roman barge in Lake Nemi, Italy. After buying the red-and-green mosaic in Europe, Fioratti spent thousands of dollars shipping it home to New York and converting it into a coffee table. For 45 years, the table sat as a beloved accent piece, garnering many compliments from visitors, Fioratti told The Associated Press.
That is until the Italian military police’s Art Recovery Unit and New York’s district attorney’s office caught wind of it. The mosaic, since returned to Italy, had been stolen from the opulent “pleasure boats” of Rome’s tyrannical emperor, Caligula (yes, as in the son of Germanicus, aka Dennis). Caligula’s pleasure boats boasted lush gardens, baths, and even hot water. Unfortunately for Fioratti, Caligula’s mosaic landed her in some hot water of her own. READ MORE...
