Römisch-Germanisches-Museum

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.