Not yet. Have some ancient wrecks to dive in Greece first.
Please register or login
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
- Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
- A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
- You can make this box go away
Well, there are excellent places to dive in Italy. But they are all quite far from Rimini...
My favourite ones:
- Portofino
- Monterosso
- Argentario
- Isola d'Elba
- Capraia
- Giglio
- Giannutri
- Ponza
- Panarea
- Ustica
- Favignana, Levanzo, Marettimo
- Pantelleria
- Lampedusa
- Scopello, Sicily
- Capo Caccia, in Sardinia, if you love caves and red coral
- Capo Palinuro, again if you like caves
There are many other places, mostly small islands (as the sites I visited and indicated above), such as Vulcano, Stromboli, Ischia, Capri, Tremiti, Linosa, Maddalena, etc...
I hope to dive in all these, in the next years.
Finally there is a place where you dive inside thermal caves (water at 37 C), no suit, no BCD, no fins. You penetrate for almost 2 km. There is almost alwais breathable air above you, so no danger. It is Grotte di Monsummano Terme, in Tuscany. One of the strangest and more memorable dives of my life.
Eric Sedletzky
Contributor
The food is probably a hell of a lot better.
My girlfriend has been pushing an Italy trip for several years, but not for diving. I said if I was to go to Italy I'd like to spend some time diving in that area, if for nothing else than to add it to my bucket list. So I started asking around. When I was on dive boats and chatting it up with other divers I'd occasionally ask if they'd ever been there.
I hit the jackpot one day on Dustin's charter out of West Palm Beach. An entire group had been there. Their words still ring in my ears as I type this. "Italy? Well it's the Mediterranean Sea. It's 'ok' but nothing like THIS (meaning the diving we were doing in West Palm).
Pretty much said it all.
I hit the jackpot one day on Dustin's charter out of West Palm Beach. An entire group had been there. Their words still ring in my ears as I type this. "Italy? Well it's the Mediterranean Sea. It's 'ok' but nothing like THIS (meaning the diving we were doing in West Palm).
Pretty much said it all.
LMAO
Just a little.
I was in Bologna to visit the Ducati factory back in July and the average restaurants knocked my socks off.
Of course it is matter of preferences, as Italy is huge and the sites are very different.
The places I indicated above are the best for my own preferences, which are:
- good visibility
- vertical walls, not sand or flat covered by Posidonia, which I dislike
- coralligen structure (mostly madreporas), with a lot of openings and cavities
- Presence of red coral or gorgonias
- Lobsters and other crustaceans
- banks of small fishes
- caves
The best for me starts around 30m, and is very nice down to 60m. There are some shallow water dives, with more light and more colours, but for a number of reasons I and my wife did usually go deeper. We discovered these shallow water dives when we started bringing our children underwater, hence it was not possible to bring them to more than 10m. The water can be very clear and there is some small fish to see, but in comparison with deeper dives, everything looks "washed out".
There are also many wrecks, including Roman ones, but I do not like them particularly.
Water temperature, at surface, is around 10-12 °C during winter and up to 24°C during summer, but usually in summer there is a thermocline at some depth, and below it the temperature is around 16-18 °C.
Of course in small islands of south Italy the temperature is generally higher than in the north, but here it is possible to dive in a wet suit also in January, even in North Italy. I remember a fabolous dive on 1st January 1990 at Portofino, with a 5mm "freediving" wetsuit. We went down to 50m, and we were not cold... We did see a swordfish!
Search for underwater photos and videos of the sites listed above.
In conclusion, I think that Italy is a very good destination for technical divers, not so good for low-level rec divers which want to limit the depth to less than 30m, except in places such as Capo Caccia, where you never exceed 30m, but you go inside caves of various length and wideness. The Grotta di Nereo is fantastic for people loving cave diving. I spent my summer holidays at Capo Caccia for more than 10 years, diving with my wife in the morning inside caves, and in the afternoon with our children in shallow-water sites.
See a video here:
Similar threads
