On August 16, 1972, in Riace, a quaint town on Calabria’s “Rainbow Coast,” formerly the land of Ulysses, the sea shimmered as sluggish holiday-makers lounged on the beach. It was Ferragosto, Italy’s national summer holiday, when schools close, cities empty, the coastlines fill, and also when a Roman chemist named Stefano Mariottini was on vacation.
That afternoon, Mariottini went diving, hunting for amberjacks and sea bream with his speargun. Twenty-six feet below the surface, he spotted something strange poking out of the sand. At first, it looked like a human hand. Could it be a body? he wondered. But as he brushed the sediment away, he realized it was something else entirely. “As I cleaned,” he told the Italian newspaper Quotidiano Nazionale, “I saw it was dark green and elaborately constructed.”
