As promised on Friday, today we’re taking a trip back in time to Roman Barcelona. 

The time machine metaphor is actually used by the City Museum’s Roman exhibit in Barcelona: you descend via an elevator (our “time machine”) from the upper floor in the museum, down underground to visit Roman, and other medieval level areas that sit between modern-day Barcelona and Roman times. There was a cute sign that illustrated the time period changes through shoes, but that was never later referenced anywhere. Too bad – could have been a cute way to illustrate how we were moving through time back “up” as we ascended through the different areas.

The museum was quite well done, though, with plexiglas cases containing the artifacts that had been unearthed, plus lots of good explanatory text about what you were seeing in the ruins, and an audio guide that tied it all together.   I have photos below from the Roman ruins part of the museum, but not from the medieval exhibits.

Some tidbits of information we discovered about the Roman area:

• The Roman Ruins are from the old town of “Barcino”, which encompassed an area near where the Cathedral sits today.
• There was a fish processing plant that made garum, a fish sauce used in just about every kind of food imaginable in Roman times
• A big laundry operation was discovered, and they have identified vats where dying (of clothing) was done, etc. The process of doing laundry, as well as dying clothing was explained.
• For bleach, the Romans used urine, and the laundry needed a lot of it. So, they would place vats along the streets for people to use. Apparently, the city was smart enough to realize that the laundry service was in that way getting free materials … so the laundry paid a tax for the privilege of collecting the contents of the vats.
• Big — other!— vats were typically used to store wine, half-buried in the ground, with only their tops exposed.
• Remains of a few fancy villas have been discovered, complete with remnants of paintings and mosaics.

The local tourist bureau has also put up signs to allow you to do a walking tour around modern Barcelona, where you can see more Roman ruins, like the old Roman walls and gate (as we saw on Friday), plus some columns hidden in a back alley, an old archway that is now part of a community center. Interesting way to have a guided walk around the old part of Barcelona. We ran out of steam before the end, so we never did see the remains of the old Roman aqueducts on the outskirts of the (old Roman) town.

As a one-time classics major, I always find it fun to see a Roman ruin or two, even when we’re not in Rome. 🙂