In July 1535, Italian inventor Guglielmo de Lorena used a one-person diving bell he had created to explore the sunken Roman barges of Emperor Caligula in Lake Nemi, near Rome. This is considered the first reliably recorded use of a modern diving bell, marking a significant step in underwater archaeology.

The 1535 Lake Nemi dives represent a pivotal moment when human curiosity turned systematically to the submerged past. This event prefigured the Romantic fascination with ruins and the submerged, which would later inspire poets like Percy Bysshe Shelley and his meditations on the remnants of Ozymandias, as well as the Victorian interest in deep time and archaeological discovery.