Römisch-Germanisches-Museum
Roman villa's floor mosaic of Dionysus, unearthed by bunker diggers in nineteen forty-one, built around in place.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Romisch-Germanisches-Museum begins in the autumn of 1941, when air-raid workers digging a bunker near Cologne Cathedral struck the floor of a Roman villa and its enormous mosaic of vines, leopards and the wine god Dionysus. It traces the villa back to the wealthy merchant who commissioned the room, laid down around the year 220, and the postwar puzzle of what to do with a floor too fragile and too magnificent to move. You'll also meet Lucius Poblicius, a veteran of the fifth legion buried nearby around the year 40, whose towering tomb still stands at the museum's street-level window.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
The Praetorium, the Roman Governor's Palace of Upper Germania, Cologne
Buried governor's palace of Roman Lower Germania, rebuilt across four centuries beneath the city hall square.
Ubii Monument
Buried Roman watchtower base of tuff stone, dated by oak piles felled in the year four or five.
Römerturm
Round Roman defense tower faced in geometric mosaics of red sandstone, white limestone and grey trachyte.
St. Gereon
Ten-sided Gothic dome wrapped around the remains of a fourth-century Roman burial hall.
Kolumba
Grey-brick museum wrapping a bombed medieval church's ruins and a postwar chapel under one roof.
Rheinboulevard
Riverside staircase over a Roman fort, where locals gather at sunset with a Kölsch.