A Maritime Pompeii

An aggressive plan to recover and restore these ships is daunting and time-consuming. The land between modern-day Pisa and the sea has a high water table, in places more than three feet above sea level, which keeps the ground spongy. This porous soil helped preserve the boats in their watery clay graves—and the same soft soil contributed to the slant of the city's famous tower. But excavating the boats is a juggling act. Exposure to oxygen is detrimental to the ancient wood, but since some of the ships are 20 feet or more underground, the ground water has to be pumped away to allow the excavation to progress. The ships that have been identified but not excavated have been covered with removable asphalt on which the outline of the boats is painted in bright yellow, blue or white, depending on the age of the ship.

So far, only a few ships have actually been removed from the ground. Their ancient wood fragments are cleaned and then soaked in a bath of water and a fungicidal solution to stop the effects of exposure to oxygen from dehydrating the perishable organic materials. The boats are extracted and treated in small sections to keep exposure to the elements minimal. Ancient wood restorers then consolidate the fragments with the larger pieces of the original boats and wrap the reconstructed vessels in a plastic film, and finally in a fiberglass material called vitroresin. Humidity and exposure to light are carefully controlled, and the ships are hung from vinyl straps to allow circulation and drainage during the preservation stages. Three major ships are now wrapped and hanging in a laboratory in Pisa and will have to soak for several years before they are stable enough to display to the public outside their fiberglass shells. Workers have shared technology with researchers in Stockholm, Sweden, who recently unveiled a multimillion-dollar museum for the only other ship of similar origin ever found.

Optimistic workers on the Pisa project hope they will also have a museum dedicated to their 39 ships by 2015, inside Pisa's nearby Arsenal museum. They hope to showcase the ships' contents and display many of the preserved ships—even if they are still hanging in fiberglass casings or soaking in glass-sided liquid basins, if that's required to preserve the artifacts. But many of the ships may never be recovered from their graves due to lack of funds and other resources it takes to preserve these ancient relics.

For now visitors can gaze down at the dig site from above for about $9, and those who pass through the sleepy San Rossore train station can always just look down from the tracks to see what is easily one of the most exciting ancient discoveries in recent history.

© 2007