Van Sabben Poster Auction 61

758 Anonymous Savona Hotels-Alberghi-Pensioni 100,5x140, 1932, on linen A-/B+ € 1300 -2000 759 Zanolio Nemi 100x70,5, 1928, on linen B+ € 360 -750 760 Villeneuve San Salvadour Côte D'Azur 75,5x106, ca. 1900, on linen A- € 600 -1200 80 How NEMi fEaTurES oNE of MuSSoliNi’S grEaT TriuMpHS Upon first glance this poster seems to feature under its big serifed letters a densely built island, resembling Mont- Saint-Michel. However, upon closer inspection it turns out to be a ship, and not just any ship, it’s Emperor Caligula’s “Prima Nave”. Fishermen had known about the remains of a big ship lying on the bottom of the Nemi lake since at least the Middle Ages, and it had been purported to be a pleasure barge ordered by Emperor Caligula to sail on the sacred lake of Diana at Nemi. The remains, however, laid too deep for the Middle Ages to recover it: all attempted recovery opera- tions had failed and only resulted in damaging the remains. So, the wreck laid on the bottom of the Nemi lake until 1927, when Italy’s youngest Prime Minister ever, Benito Mussolini ordered engineer Guido Ucelli to drain the lake in order to retrieve the shipwreck of Caligula’s barge. The draining started in October 1928 in the presence of Mussolini and in March 1929 the water level had been lowered enough to reveal the barge and a second set of remains for another smaller ship. The ship was a landmark discovery in attributing Terminus Post Quems, or earliest date of adoption, as the ship con- tained technologies that were considered to have been adopted by the Romans decades later, or even in some cases a millennium later. The colossal Prima Nave resembled a floating palace rather than a regular ship, it contained hot and cold-water pumps for pools and foun- tains, mosaic floors and heating. The ship was richly decorated with expensive copper han- dles, lead sheeting and showed signs of great structures build upon it, not just of wood but also of bricks and stone. Mussolini, who had been the driving force behind the retrieval of the wrecks, had a large museum built for the Roman remains, the Nemi museum, which was finished in 1936. The ships were open to the public until March 31st of 1944, when misdirected allied mortars caused the entire museum to go up in flames and both ships were almost completely lost, with only a handful of pieces of charred wood and metalwork surviving the fire. 761 F. Hugo d' Alési (1849-1906) Chemins de Fer du Midi aux Pyrénées 73x106, ca. 1896, on linen B+ € 500 -1000 Mussolini at the inauguration of the ships at the museum in Nemi, 5th of may, 1940 The Prima Nave fully excavated on the bottom of lake Nemi, ca. 1929 The charred remains of the burned-out museum, 1944 © Jules Soeters, 2023