On August 4, 1998, Mike Dudas got his first look at the wreck of the Andrea Doria.

Lying on her starboard side in the cold Atlantic waters about 50 miles south of Nantucket, the 700-foot cruise liner stretched into the blue-green darkness far beyond the limits of his vision.

Described by Life magazine as a “floating guide to art,” the S/S Andrea Doria was a flagship of the Italian Line, a line of luxury passenger ships that sailed between Europe and the United States.

The design boasted three outdoor swimming pools, multiple ballrooms, spaces for indoor and outdoor games, and extravagant first-class staterooms individually decorated by Italian artists.

Paintings, tapestries, ceramics, and other works of art adorned the ship’s public areas, and the dining tables were set with etched crystal and fine Italian porcelain.

“Into every detail of this lovely vessel have gone the skill and pride of the greatest artisans of Italy,” read one advertisement.

“Every mural, every tapestry, every rug and chair…each exquisite bit of glassware and every glowing tile is the work of craftsmen.”

On July 25, 1956, the Andrea Doria was nearing completion of her 101st transatlantic crossing.

The ship had left Genoa, Italy, with 1,706 passengers and crew eight days earlier and was due to dock in New York City the following morning.

By 10 p.m., many of her passengers had gone to bed, although some were making the most of their last night at sea, betting on mechanical horse races and playing bingo in the first-class lounge, dancing to an eight-piece orchestra, or watching the movie Foxfire on a screen set up in the tourist-class dining room.

On the bridge, Captain Piero Calamai had joined the officers on watch.

That afternoon, the Andrea Doria had steamed into a thick bank of fog, and at times visibility was practically zero.

Calamai had slowed the ship from 23 knots to 21.8, but he had a deadline for arrival in New York.

With the cruise liner’s watertight doors sealed and the foghorn blasting at regular intervals, Calamai had posted an extra lookout on the bow but was relying on the radar for advanced hazard warning.

At the same time, a smaller cruise liner was outbound from New York City, heading for Gothenburg, Sweden.

The M/S Stockholm was just over 520 feet long, carrying 534 passengers and more than 200 crew members.

Captain Harry Gunnar Nordenson had chosen to follow his usual route out of the Long Island Sound, aiming to pass within a few miles of the Nantucket Lightship—a vessel anchored as a floating lighthouse to mark the dangerous shoals south of the island.

This was some 20 miles north of the recommended route for outbound traffic, but it would save both time and fuel—important commodities in the cruise industry.

At about 10:45 p.m., a blip appeared on the Andrea Doria’s radar screen, roughly 17 nautical miles away.

The dot was a few degrees to starboard, and Calamai assumed it was a fishing trawler heading toward Nantucket.

On board the Stockholm, third officer Johan-Ernst Carstens-Johannsen was in charge of the bridge.

The 26-year-old had orders to summon the captain if the ship encountered fog, but from his perspective it was a clear, moonlit night.

The fogbank on the horizon was invisible in the dark.

The Stockholm’s radar picked up the Andrea Doria a bit before 11 p.m., when the ship was about 12 nautical miles away.

Carstens-Johannsen took two radar bearings, recording the approaching ship’s angle and distance a few minutes apart.

With this information, he calculated that the other ship would pass within a mile to the Stockholm’s port side—too close for comfort.

Carstens-Johannsen was right to be concerned, but wrong about the angle.

Radar was a relatively new technology at the time and could be inaccurate by several degrees.

Adding to the confusion, the Stockholm’s helmsman, Peder Larsen, was on his first voyage with the ship and was struggling to steer a straight course, yawing several degrees to either side of the assigned heading and making it hard to record accurate bearings.

Later analysis of the collision would show that the Andrea Doria was actually on track to pass slightly to starboard, not port.

At 11:05, Calamai ordered a 4-degree turn to port aboard the Andrea Doria, believing this would widen the gap between the two ships.

International regulations required that ships approaching each other head-on both turn to starboard to pass safely, but Calamai (who was watching the radar but had not plotted the approaching ship’s course) assumed the supposed fishing trawler would continue straight and pass safely to starboard.

At 11:07, Carstens-Johannsen ordered a 20-degree turn to starboard aboard the Stockholm.

At 11:10, with less than a mile separating them, the two ships could finally see each other’s lights through the fog.

They were on a collision course.

Carstens-Johannsen ordered the Stockholm’s helm hard to starboard and the engines to full reverse.

Calamai ordered the Andrea Doria’s helm hard to port.

But it was too late.

Less than a minute later, traveling at 18.5 knots, the Stockholm plowed into the Andrea Doria’s starboard side.

The Stockholm’s reinforced bow, designed to fend off ice in northern harbors, stabbed some 40 feet into the larger Italian ship, rending open seven of the Andrea Doria’s 11 decks just aft of the bridge.

(One passenger on the Stockholm described the ship coming to a sudden stop followed by a “crunching sensation.”)

The two ships remained connected for a moment, dragged forward by the Andrea Doria’s momentum, before the Stockholm tore free and the sea rushed in.

Forty-six passengers aboard the Andrea Doria and five crew members on the Stockholm were killed as a result of the collision.

Within minutes the Andrea Doria began listing heavily in the waves, but she would stay afloat for nearly 11 hours—enough time for nearby ships to rescue the remaining passengers.

The Stockholm limped back to New York, its bow in tatters.

And the next morning, just after 10 a.m., the Andrea Doria sank beneath the waves.

Almost immediately, intrepid divers set their sights on the wreck.

The day after the ship sank, two amateurs, Peter Gimbel and Joseph Fox, made the descent.

Armed with wetsuits, rudimentary dive gear, and an underwater camera, the two friends paid a Nantucket fisherman to take them out to the site.

The water surface was slick with oil, and air still bubbled from the wreck as the men dragged themselves down the anchor rope of a Coast Guard buoy marking the spot.

Gimbel took only a handful of photos of the sunken liner before Fox started having trouble, likely because his dive gear wasn’t up to the task.

Gimbel helped him back to the surface, where he was able to recover.

The close call did not deter Gimbel, who would return to the Andrea Doria many times over the following years, selling his photos to Life magazine and filming two documentaries about the ship.

The Andrea Doria was remarkably intact, and Gimbel’s early exploits showed that she could be reached.

It was only a matter of time before other divers followed.

In 1964, two businessmen funded an expedition to retrieve the life-size bronze statue of Admiral Andrea Doria from the ship’s first-class lounge.

They brought up most of it, cutting the statue off at the ankles and leaving behind the feet and base, which were bolted to the deck.

In 1981, Gimbel and his team cut a hole into the Andrea Doria’s hull to retrieve the ship’s three-ton safe, rumored to be filled with diamonds and other jewels worth over a million dollars.

(It actually contained a small number of bank notes and traveler’s checks.)

But many of the Andrea Doria’s treasures are smaller items scattered in the chaos of the collision—a silver jewelry box, a charm bracelet, a makeup compact—along with caches of elegant gilt-edged porcelain from the first-class dining rooms.

Over the decades, the wreck of the Andrea Doria became known as the Mount Everest of diving, in part because of its bucket-list allure, but also because of its very real risks.

Since the ship went down, 18 divers have lost their lives trying to explore the sunken liner—making it one of the most treacherous shipwrecks on the East Coast.

So why do divers keep coming?

For some, it’s the challenge and the rare opportunity to explore a place that few people will ever see.

For others, it’s the possibility of unearthing priceless artifacts or the satisfaction of salvaging what remains of an extraordinary piece of history.

But after 70 years on the seafloor, the Andrea Doria is a collapsing husk of her former glory.

Whole decks have crumbled, pieces of the bow and stern have fallen off, and the entire wreck has lost some 30 feet in height.

It’s only a matter of time before there’s little left to explore.

The 1990s were a particularly bad set of years for Andrea Doria divers.

Between 1992 and 1999, eight men perished while exploring the wreck.

“It seemed like somebody was dying on every trip,” says Tom Packer, who has been diving the wreck since the early ’80s and often crewed charters to the Andrea Doria with his dive partner Steve Gatto.

“We would look around and go, ‘Who’s not coming back?’”

The ship rises up some 80 feet from a seabed that is 250 feet below the surface, well beyond the reach of recreational divers.

At those depths, the human body experiences six to eight times more pressure—and consumes roughly six to eight times more air—than at the surface.

The additional pressure makes it easier for air inhaled at depth to dissolve into the bloodstream and tissues, where different gases can cause a variety of issues including narcosis, oxygen toxicity, and decompression sickness (also known as the bends).

Doria divers must plan carefully to avoid these hazards and carry additional tanks of compressed air.

Divers approaching the wreck experience limited visibility and powerful currents that can exhaust even the most seasoned.

Those venturing inside during the ’90s would have encountered a maze of sideways stairwells and collapsing hallways filled with decaying metal and dangling wires, every surface covered in a thick layer of silt billowing up in turbid clouds when disturbed.

In 1996, Gatto and Packer became the first divers to reach the Andrea Doria’s engine room.

Both men were experienced Doria divers, but Gatto still had a close call.

They had plotted out the dive meticulously, and everything was going to plan.

They had entered the cavernous ventilation shaft, passing the remains of catwalks, pipes, and steel beams, and found the engine room’s massive gauge panel.

Packer hung back while Gatto, who had been filming the dive, swam up and down the panel to capture the telegraphs, throttle wheels, and circular glass gauges.

With his focus on the camera, Gatto momentarily lost track of where he was.

He turned away from the panel, expecting to see the hole he had swum through.

Instead, there was a wall.

“For a brief moment in time, it was just that heat that goes through your body,” Gatto says.

“And you’re like, ‘Oh, this is bad.’”

Gatto immediately started feeling the effects of narcosis.

“Getting narced” is a hazard for any deep-water diver breathing compressed air.

When inhaled nitrogen dissolves into the blood and tissues, it can cause feelings of euphoria or disorientation, slow critical thinking, and affect memory and coordination.

Anxiety increases the risk of narcosis, as does cold water.

Gatto went back to the gauge panel in an attempt to orient himself, turning his back to it and slowly swimming forward.

He had been exploring the Andrea Doria for more than 10 years at this point and knew to move slowly and methodically, even if he was having difficulty focusing.

He tried to signal to Packer that he was in trouble but couldn’t collect his thoughts well enough to communicate.

Gatto described the experience later, narrating over video footage of silt-covered metal and drifting debris.

“Random pieces of information were skipping around my brain.

I was still struggling to put my thoughts in some kind of order.”

He snapped back into focus when he caught a glimpse of one of the strobe lights the divers had left to mark their route.

Gatto was able to slowly work his way back out of the ship and await Packer on the outside of the hull.

The desire to take home a small piece of the famous ship has lured many, even those with limited experience exploring complicated wrecks in cold and murky Northeast waters.

By the 1990s, the dive community was buzzing with stories of Doria divers emerging from the water with bags full of fine porcelain dishware or pieces of ceramic artwork.

With obvious caches of the sought-after dinnerware already emptied, divers needed to go deeper or find unexplored parts of the ship from which to unearth a prize.

At the same time, advances in diving technology made the wreck seem more accessible than ever.

Standard protocol had been to carry tanks of compressed surface air (78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen).

The introduction of mixed-gas diving—in which users could replace some nitrogen with helium to reduce narcosis—allowed divers to go deeper and think more clearly at depth.

What had once been the domain of a small group of highly experienced Northeast wreck divers began to attract a wider crowd, not all of whom were prepared for the cold water, swift currents, and other challenges of a Doria dive.

“Suddenly anybody who could afford it started filling their tanks with some sort of helium mixtures and wiping out the narcosis,” Packer says.

Gatto, who has made more than 250 dives to the Andrea Doria, believes “they were substituting technology for experience.”

And the new tools came with their own hazards.

Mixed gas didn’t reduce all risk and added another level of complexity to the endeavor.

Doria divers still needed to make long decompression stops at various depths on their way to the surface to avoid decompression sickness, and the deeper or longer they stayed, the more crucial those stops became.

To manage it, divers started carrying a variety of tanks with different gas mixes—low-oxygen mixes for deeper depths, and higher-oxygen mixes for decompressing.

Used correctly, the system worked.

Used incorrectly, it could be fatal.

At depth, too much oxygen could trigger seizures or a sudden blackout; in an emergency, a diver grabbing the wrong bottle might not realize the mistake until it was too late.

Gatto and Packer emerged from their near miss in the engine room unscathed and triumphant.

They didn’t have much to show for it—only a couple of innocuous brass handles from the two telegraphs, barely three and a half inches long.

But they had ventured someplace no one else had been since the night the Andrea Doria sank and had returned to tell the tale.

When Mike Dudas made his maiden dive on August 4, 1998, and saw the Doria stretched out in front of him in the murky depths, he thought, “Boy, I get it.”

The size and majesty of the Italian luxury liner, even in her decaying state, was unlike any other East Coast shipwreck he had visited.

Dudas, whose family owned a dive shop in Pennsylvania, grew up surrounded by stories of the Andrea Doria.

In 1967, his mother had been the first woman to dive the shipwreck, and his father had retrieved the ship’s main bridge compass, which had been in his family living room as long as he could remember.

The sunken vessel was considered the pinnacle of wreck diving in the Northeast, and he was finally seeing it for himself.

“This is like nothing else,” says Dudas.

There were two charter boats at the wreck that day—a pile of dishware had been discovered earlier in the summer, and everyone was on the hunt for more.

But Dudas stayed outside the sunken ship, using her bulk to shield himself from the current as he swam slowly down the promenade deck.

For 15 minutes, he was alone with the Andrea Doria, marveling at the wreck he’d heard so much about.

Then he returned to the anchor line to meet the other divers from his group and ascend to their first decompression stop on the way to the surface.

Back on their boat, Dudas and the other divers from his charter ate lunch, allowing time for any residual gases in their bodies to dissipate.

They planned to make another dive in the afternoon.

Then, a body floated to the surface.

It was one of the men from the other charter.

Divers rushed to get him on board that boat, pulling off his tanks and cutting away gear to start CPR.

But the man remained unresponsive.

Several hours later, he was airlifted off the dive boat by a Coast Guard helicopter.

Vince Napoliello, a 32-year-old stockbroker and experienced Doria diver, was pronounced dead at Cape Cod Hospital that night.

He was the tenth person to die diving the Andrea Doria; the third in less than two months.

The divers on Dudas’s charter opted to get back in the water the next day.

Dudas was able to borrow a phone to call his mother and leave a message: “Hey, if you hear anything, it’s not me.

I’m okay.”

He knows that wreck diving is a dangerous hobby—his father died while diving in 1982, when Dudas was still young.

Improved protocols and training have certainly made things safer, but it will always be more dangerous than staying home.

Jennifer Sellitti is the manager of Atlantic Wreck Salvage, a group that locates and recovers artifacts from shipwrecks.

Since 2010, the outfit has made annual trips on their dive boat, the D/V Tenacious, to the Andrea Doria, retrieving numerous items, including the ship’s foghorn in 2017.

Her team makes a point of restoring salvaged artifacts and sharing them with the public.

“The Doria has this allure,” says Sellitti, 52, whose day job is leading the public defender’s office for the state of New Jersey.

“She just keeps giving in a way that a lot of other shipwrecks don’t.”

Sellitti is warm and confident, and has never been good at sitting idle.

In addition to her shipwreck work and her full-time job, she keeps goats, cows, and ducks on a small farm, is in the midst of a home renovation, and just finished writing a book.

Her hobby of choice used to be ice climbing, but she was swept into the world of wreck diving by her partner, Joe Mazraani, and quickly became captivated by the history behind each wreck.

She soon found herself earning her captain’s license, running the ship with Mazraani and providing surface support for the divers.

She acknowledges the dangers of diving the Andrea Doria and other North Atlantic wrecks.

“It’s a volatile environment,” she says.

“There are very few people who have the diving skills, the logistical capabilities to get out there and make these dives.”

Mazraani, a fierce defense attorney on land and gruff captain, shipwreck hunter, and technical diver at sea, was one of them.

Chris Ogden, a construction superintendent with sleeve tattoos and an infectious energy, was another.

On July 11, 2025, Ogden was 230 feet below the surface when he saw something that made him catch his breath.

The 36-year-old had swum into a crevice in the decaying hull of the Andrea Doria and was hoping to find a way to retrieve a brass window from a tangle of wires and fishing nets.

But as he panned his light across the debris, he spotted a distinctive circular shape—the top of one of the ship’s gyrocompass repeaters.

“I was like, ‘Holy shit, that’s the compass,’” Ogden says.

“I started freaking out...

I just wanted to get up and tell Joe.”

The five-foot-tall brass navigation instrument would have stood on the Andrea Doria’s port bridge wing, displaying the ship’s heading on her last day afloat.

Buzzing with excitement, Ogden cut his dive short and made his way back to the surface, waiting impatiently at his decompression stops.

Mazraani, meanwhile, already knew about the compass.

He had spotted it on his own dive half an hour earlier.

As Ogden pulled himself up onto the boat’s swim platform, Mazraani allowed himself a grin.

“What did you find, Chris?”

he asked.

“I found the compass!”

“So did I.”

Ogden could hardly believe they had both been in the same tight, tangled spot.

“Nobody in their right mind would ever find this thing,” he says.

But Mazraani described the exact location.

“Congratulations, it’s yours,” Ogden said.

“But it’s coming up.

We’re getting that thing up.”

Mazraani was game to try but had his doubts.

The compass was buried in the bowels of the wreck, trapped under massive amounts of debris.

“There’s no way this is coming up this trip,” he told Sellitti as they walked into the cabin.

“No way.”

Shipwreck salvage can be contentious.

Some argue that the historic artifacts should be left in place or only retrieved by archaeologists.

But Doria divers point out that the wreck is difficult to reach and rapidly deteriorating.

Any items not found are likely to be lost in shifting sand and debris, never to be seen by anyone.

John Moyer started diving the Andrea Doria in the early ’80s and, after helping to retrieve the ship’s stern bell, began researching the vessel in more detail.

What started as a way to learn about what else he could recover quickly grew into a fascination in the ship’s history.

Over the years he has corresponded with engineers and shipwrights, met with survivors, and collected binders full of historical documents.

He, along with Packer and Gatto, also holds the salvage rights to the ship, which he acquired as part of a large-scale operation to retrieve two massive ceramic friezes by sculptor Guido Gambone that had once been mounted in the ship’s Winter Garden lounge.

“Two years later…the Winter Garden was completely gone,” Moyer says.

“If we hadn’t recovered the panels in 1993, they would have been lost forever.”

Moyer, along with fellow diver Gary Gentile, is also responsible for reuniting the bronze statue of Admiral Andrea Doria with its original feet and base, which they retrieved from the wreck in the ’90s.

The men acquired the rest of the statue in 2024 from the family of the captain who led the 1964 recovery, and had it restored to like-new condition, with the addition of a single barnacle still attached to the base.

The admiral towers in the corner of Moyer’s living room, standing watch over the rest of his collection.

Now in his 70s, Moyer has retired from diving, but his home is filled with evidence of his fascination with the Italian liner.

Artifacts from his dives fill display cases and decorate the walls, along with other items that he has been gifted or purchased at auctions.

He even has a copy of Popular Mechanics from 1958 with an article titled “How We’ll Raise the Andrea Doria.”

(Spoiler: We did not.)

In 2025, he loaned out a small portion of his collection—including a deck chair, a life jacket worn by a young passenger the night of the collision, and a 140-pound brass bell—to the Italian American Museum in New York City for an exhibit on the ship’s final voyage.

Moyer sees himself as a temporary custodian of these artifacts.

But he’d like them to have a permanent home.

“I’m hoping to find some museum that will want to...have some big Andrea Doria exhibit,” Moyer says.

“That’s always been my goal, to recover this stuff, put it on public display.”

Retrieving the Andrea Doria’s gyrocompass this past July would turn out to be Mazraani’s last contribution to salvaging what remains of the ship.

He and Ogden had four more dives planned over the two and a half days that remained in their expedition, each limited to barely 40 minutes on the bottom.

The compass was buried in debris in a small space maybe five feet in any direction and surrounded by jagged metal.

The first step was to remove the fishing nets that hung throughout the area, threatening to snag anything that moved.

“If you didn’t clear the nets...you probably wouldn’t get out,” Ogden says.

Once they had cut the nets free, the men returned with any tool that might be useful—crowbars, hammers, wedges, a knife duct-taped to a boat pole—to start excavating pipes, cables, and chunks of the ship’s hull.

“We probably put a pile outside the room that was eight-foot-high by 10-foot-long, five-foot-wide.

That’s how much debris we had to pull out,” Ogden says.

It took the better part of three dives to clear the space.

The five-foot-tall brass cylinder of the compass was attached to a base trapped under several large cables.

After consulting with Mazraani, Ogden swam through a small hole in the side of the room to pry the cables free with a crowbar.

The space was too narrow for him to turn around when he was finished.

“Before we planned that dive, I told Joe, ‘You’re gonna need to pull me out fins first, because I won’t have room to wiggle my way out backwards,’ and that’s exactly what happened,” Ogden says.

He still felt things catching on his gear as Mazraani pulled him free.

“That’s literally putting your life in somebody else’s hands.”

With just one dive left, the pair realized there were too many sharp pieces of metal to run straps across and out the top hole.

They would need to tip the compass over and drag it out sideways.

It stretched their time on the bottom, but they managed to get the compass in place rigged with straps, which led outside the ship to a lift bag rated to hoist 500 pounds.

Mazraani filled the bag with air from a spare tank, and as it rose toward the surface, the compass quickly started to break free.

“It almost took me out,” Ogden says.

“I swam for my damn life, and the next thing you know, the thing rips through a wall in the room and it’s out.”

The compass was in the clear, held taut between the lift bag straining toward the surface and a line the men had tied to keep it from ascending before they were ready.

As Mazraani began his ascent, Ogden tied a reel of line to the compass, made sure the way to the surface was clear, and cut the rope holding the artifact down.

The compass shot upward, picking up speed until it reached the surface less than a minute later.

Ogden tied the line off to the wreck, collected their tools, and started his own ascent behind Mazraani.

When Mazraani emerged on the surface, Sellitti was filming.

He climbed quietly onto the boat—he was always a bit cranky coming out of the water, Sellitti says, no matter what happened.

“Look at the grumpy face,” she joked from behind the camera.

Then, after a pause, “Words?”

Mazraani answered with the barest hint of a smile, “That was fun.”

The gyrocompass emerged mostly intact, missing only the face marked with degrees and cardinal directions to indicate the ship’s heading.

And there was a mysterious scrap of rope tied around the binnacle, evidence that some other diver had been there previously.

But who?

Mazraani never had the chance to find out.

He died unexpectedly on July 29, 2025, at the age of 47, after suffering a medical emergency while exploring an unidentified wreck on the eastern edge of Georges Bank, some 200 miles off of Cape Cod.

Sellitti and her fellow divers sounded the Andrea Doria’s foghorn at his memorial.

“Joe was obsessed with finding out who tied that rope,” Sellitti says.

“The day before he died, we had a whole conversation about it.”

Less than a week later, Sellitti got a call from Al Giddings, who had been part of an expedition to the Andrea Doria with a group of Italians filming a documentary in 1968.

He had seen an article about the compass retrieval.

“I’m gonna tell you something about your gyrocompass repeater,” he said.

“It has everything except the face...because the face is in my living room.”

Sellitti started to laugh.

“The first order of business for Joe was to let us all know who tied the string around the compass,” she says.

It felt like a sign.

Despite 70 years of decay, the Andrea Doria continues to call to divers, though perhaps not as loudly as she once did.

Reaching her aging hull is a badge of honor, and there is still the sense that she hides more treasures within her crumbling walls.

“The Doria, to this day, has that allure,” Mike Dudas says.

He tries to get back every year.

“It’s always changing, it’s always dynamic, and people always want to know about it.”

For Dudas and many of today’s Andrea Doria divers, the fact that the wreck keeps changing is part of her draw.

Each collapsed section and rusted hull plate reveals tantalizing possibilities.

But each year, she gets a little further away from the glorious ship she once was.

Nothing lasts forever in the harsh conditions of the North Atlantic, and someday soon, the ocean will reclaim the bones of the Andrea Doria.

And when the scraps of her hull are buried in the sand, the ship’s legacy will be found in a thousand artifacts scattered across homes and dive shops and museums-—and in the stories of the divers who dared to reach her.

The Mount Everest of Shipwrecks ^⁠6%

Speakers

Tom Packer

Analysis

Biases

Fallacies

Manipulations

The Mount Everest of Shipwrecks ⁠6%