exceeding expectations

As an ex English primary school teacher I have "done" The Romans countless times - made the clay oil lamps, draped the kids in sheets, made the cardboard villas and paper maché volcanoes. We've visited Roman forts galore in England, been to Pompeii, Herculaneum and Rome so when we agreed to join Maggie and Bill to see Roman excavations in the Gers I was all ready to be underwhelmed.

But how wrong can you be !

Our first stop was a fairly new museum built around the excavations of a Roman villa at Eauze. I was so impressed with the whole museum "experience". It began with what seemed a rather odd computer generated film with real actors superimposed telling a story of daily life in the villa, next to the ruins there were models recreating how the villa was thought to have looked. The excavations themselves were amazing and after the  film and the model it was so easy to visualise how the villa would have been. Little details such as markers showing where certain artefacts had been found ( eg the stylus used for writing on a clay slate) reminded you of little moments in the film.







The structure built to protect the excavations from the elements was very pleasing too.

Next stop was an older museum site at Saviac - another Roman villa - this time the outstanding feature was the number of amazing mosaics on the site - almost complete floors, one room after another just beautiful! I love mosaics and this was mosaic heaven.










In another week or so the mosaics will all be covered with sand to protect them over the winter months so we were there just in time.

The icing on the cake was a quick visit to the museum in Montreal where there were even more mosaics discovered at Saviac - being displayed indoors meant the colours were even better