Unusual 'Coffee Table' Is a Mosaic From One of Caligula's Party Ships
While visiting Italy in the 1960s , antiquities dealer Helen Fioratti and her Italian journalist husband acquired a keepsake : a red - and - fleeceable inlaid marble mosaic , which the pair purchase from Italian blue blood and later re - purposed as a chocolate board . But when Italian police came knocking on their apartment door in New York City decades later , the two learn that their “ table ” was actually a fragment of one of the Roman Catholic Emperor Caligula ’s pleasure ship , according to NBC News ....