Streets of the Romans
Streets of the Romans is a modern term for the tourist marketing of around 80 Roman sights, including monuments and museums. The focus is on the Roman UNESCO World Heritage in Trier . The area includes the Saarland , parts of Rhineland-Palatinate (the holiday regions Moselle , Eifel and Hunsrück ), the Luxembourg Moselle, the Luxembourg city of Echternach and the city of Arlon in Belgium.
The stations of the 'Roads of the Romans' are not connected by a holiday route with a linear course, but represent a network of ancient sights in spatial proximity.
Roman roads and stations
The entire road network of the Romans covered over 100,000 kilometers in the Roman Empire and was primarily used for military purposes. For practical reasons, the Roman roads mostly ran on heights and mountain ranges, as these roads could not be easily attacked and dried up faster in rainy times. The focus of the Roads of the Romans project is the oldest Roman city in Germany , Augusta Treverorum ( Trier ), as an important junction of the Roman roads already in Roman times . On various historically documented roads that are still recognizable in the landscape today, such as the Via Agrippa (Römerstrasse Trier – Cologne), one could follow the Roman forts and places to Beda vicus ( Bitburg ) and Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium ( Cologne ) Antunnacum ( Andernach ) as well as Neumagen (Noviomagus) and Belgica ( cheap ) to Confluentes ( Koblenz ) and many other cities as well as the Limes . The Römerstraße , known today as Ausoniusstraße , leads from Trier via Dumnissus ( Kirchberg ) to Bingium ( Bingen am Rhein ).
In addition to the north (Cologne), Trier was connected to the south via Mediomatricum ( Metz ) and Lugdunum ( Lyon ) with Rome by one of the Agrippa roads. Under Agrippa Street is today understood under Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa , the Roman general and son of Augustus as governor of Gaul , there from Lugdunum (Lyon) from four built highways. According to the ancient geographer Strabo, these are : one […] to Aquitaine , one to the Rhine and thirdly to the ocean with the Bellovakians and Ambians [ Amiens ], the fourth is the one to the Narbonite and Massali coast [ Marseille ] . The Gallo-Roman vicus of Dalheim (Luxembourg) lay on Agrippastrasse .
The sights, which are connected by the 'streets of the Romans', are both elaborately partially reconstructed facilities and ancient relics, of which only the foundation walls can be seen. Some of the stations are accessible to tourists by bike and hiking trails.
Imperial and municipal representative buildings can be seen in the former imperial residence of Trier. Religion is presented through various temple complexes. Grave monuments show the diverse burial system in antiquity. Roman everyday life can be traced back to settlements such as manors / villas and street settlements / vici . Extraction of raw materials and (mass) production, trade and also infrastructure measures are addressed through mines and quarries, water pipes and road fragments, among other things. Ancient wine presses prove that the Romans were already growing wine in the Moselle valley. Fortifications illuminate the military situation in Roman times. The archaeological finds from the monuments can be viewed in the respective museums. The individual stations are partially connected to each other with hiking and themed trails.
Tourist offers
In addition to the purely historical aspects from the region's Roman past, the proposed programs for the tourist and adventure roads, Roman Roads, place particular emphasis on "tangible history" in close connection with scientific knowledge. The stations include both ruins of Roman buildings and reconstructed villas such as the Roman Villa Borg , in which the bathing culture of the Romans is reproduced.
In addition to guided tours, some stations also offer events and living history , for example trips on a replica Roman ship or in a reconstructed Roman traveling car, plays and baking bread in a reconstructed antique kitchen. Various Roman festivals take place regularly, in which groups for experimental archeology from the project area take part. You can also get involved in archaeological excavations. There are also offers especially for families, as well as seminars on Roman cuisine.
In addition, the tourist route offers special offers from the culinary area, such as in the sub-project “Taste Antiquity”, in which Roman cuisine is revived and reinterpreted.
Tourist implementation
The core of the Roads of the Romans project goes back to the European Valley of the Moselle tourism concept of the European Tourism Institute GmbH at the University of Trier in 1993. The client was the tourism working group of the Saar-Lor-Lux-Trier / West Palatinate regional commission. The area covered the valley of the Moselle from the source to the mouth.
The core of the Road of the Romans project in its new form was the implementation of extensive umbrella marketing in cooperation with Konstantin-Ausstellunggesellschaft GmbH. The project sponsorship was taken over by Mosellandtouristik GmbH. The realization and financing took place in cooperation with the project partners Eifel Tourismus GmbH, Hunsrück-Touristik GmbH, Tourismus Zentrale Saarland GmbH with the project group Celts and Romans and LEADER Miselerland (Luxembourg) as well as the Luxembourg city of Echternach. In addition, the Konstantin exhibition company acted as a project partner. There was also close cooperation with the responsible monument preservation authorities.
The joint marketing measures were funded within the framework of the EU community initiative LEADER + with the participation of the European Union and the State of Rhineland-Palatinate, represented by the Ministry of Economics, Transport, Agriculture and Viticulture (European Orientation and Guarantee Fund for Agriculture, Orientation Department) . Cooperation partners were the LAG Mosel, LAG Moselfranken, LAG Vulkaneifel, LAG Hunsrück and LAG Miselerland (Luxembourg). The state of Rhineland-Palatinate also provided state funding for the tourist development and valorisation of Roman sights. Appropriate funding was also granted through the European Union (LEADER).
The stations for the Roman Road project were selected in 2005 by a jury consisting, among other things, of the managing directors of the tourism organizations, municipal representatives and archaeologists from the responsible monument conservation authorities. The selected stations were divided into three categories: “Worth a trip”, “Worth a trip” and “Interesting find along the way”.
After the successful conclusion of the Constantine exhibition, the project partners, Straße der Römer, decided to continue it and, in this context, further extensive marketing measures.
In 2009, the rights of use to the logo and corporate design created for the Straße der Römer project were transferred from the Greater Region Tourism Working Group to Mosellandtouristik GmbH as the project sponsor of the Straße der Römer. The logo was then relaunched. In addition, the name was changed from singular to plural in order to take into account the fact that it is not a linear holiday route and that the stations of the project also include Roman roads such as the Ausonius hiking trail .
See also
- Exhibition: The Romans on the Moselle and Saar
literature
- Maxwell G. Lay: The History of the Road. From the beaten path to the motorway . Campus Verlag, Frankfurt / Main / New York 1994, ISBN 3-593-35132-3 (305 pp., English: Ways of the World. A History of the World's Roads and of the Vehicles that used them . New Brunswick, NJ 1992 Translated by Thomas Pampuch and Timothy Slater, Universal Scientific History of Roads and Road Use, which covers all aspects - from road construction and financing to vehicles and wheel loads to traffic regulations, traffic signs and traffic planning. With extensive literature from the English-speaking world Streets of the Romans pp. 72–77).
- Hans Hitzer: The street. From the beaten path to the motorway. Lifelines from primeval times to today (= cultural history in individual representations ). Verlag Georg DWCallwey, Munich 1971, ISBN 3-7667-0201-7 (349 pp., Universal history of the streets with references. On the streets of the Romans, pp. 35–92).
- Joseph Hagen : Roman roads of the Rhine province (= historical atlas of the Rhine province . Volume 8 ). 2nd Edition. Bonn 1931.
- Harm-Eckart Beier: Investigation of the design of the Roman road network in the area of Eifel, Hunsrück and Palatinate from the perspective of the road construction engineer . Goslar 1971.
- Heinz-Egon Rösch : Road (s) of the Romans from Trier to the Rhine, into the Eifel, into Saarland and to Luxembourg . Leinpfad-Verlag, Ingelheim 2007, ISBN 978-3-937782-50-8 (cultural history hiking guide).
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Strabon 4, 6, 11 C 208, quoted from Michael Rathmann: The meaning of the streets in the Roman Empire , in Erftstadt Colloquium p. 29