Romano-Germanic Museum

About this place

Cologne is a Roman city before it is anything else: the Romans founded it as a colonia in the year fifty, and that is where the name comes from. This museum is that city's storeroom — glass, mosaic, gravestones and gold jewellery pulled from beneath the streets of the modern centre, a great deal of it turning up by accident during wartime and post-war digging. The original building on Roncalliplatz beside the cathedral was put up in nineteen seventy-four directly over the Dionysos mosaic, found in nineteen forty-one while an air-raid shelter was being excavated: some seventy square metres of coloured tesserae left where they lay, with the museum built around them. Beside it stands the tomb of Poblicius, about fifteen metres high. The difficulty is that this building has been shut since twenty nineteen for a full refurbishment, and the mosaic and the tomb are locked inside it with no confirmed reopening date. The collection is meanwhile shown at the Belgisches Haus near Neumarkt, roughly ten minutes' walk away: about a thousand well-presented objects — but the museum's two most famous pieces are not among them.