The Venetian Warships of Lake Garda. News of the Benacus Project: What If Fresh Water Is No Longer Protective?

With the French at the door, on May 31st of 1509, the Head of the Venetian Garda fleet received the order to burn and sink the ships and come back to Venice: the war on the lake was temporarily lost. The small fleet, whose base was at Lazise, was formed by one light galley and two fustas, so the commandant sunk the galley and one fusta in front of the town and went with the third ship to the northern lake to take a safe trip to Venice on horseback. One shipwreck was discovered in 1960 and was studied in several campaigns, but it was not clear if it was a small galley or a large fusta. New research was started in 2018 with BENĀCUS, a project of the Department of Humanities and Cultural Heritage of the University of Udine, in a joint venture with the Trieste and Firenze Universities, and under the Superintendency for the Archaeology, Arts and Landscape of the provinces of Verona, Vicenza and Rovigo. The aim of this project was an historical research and geophysical survey to map the underwater cultural heritage (UCH) of Garda Lake.