Roman cities

A “city” in this guide is a Roman town of any legal rank: a colony founded for settlers, a provincial centre that grew up around a road junction or river crossing, or a fortified settlement that acquired a forum, walls and cemeteries. What they share is that they were places people lived in permanently, which is also why so little of them is easy to see. Most Roman towns in this region lie under towns that never stopped being towns.

That does not make them poor visits, but it changes what a visit looks like. Instead of one fenced site you get fragments spread across a modern centre: a stretch of town wall turned into a park, a mosaic under a glass floor, a baptistery in a courtyard, tombstones built into a later church. Emona, under Ljubljana, is the model case. It was laid out as a typical Roman town, a rectangle with a central forum and a grid of intersecting streets, with cemeteries along the roads leading out towards Celeia, Aquileia and Neviodunum. Its remains turn up in every construction project in the city centre, and the pieces that are on show today (parts of the wall, houses, mosaics, an early Christian baptistery) are scattered accordingly.

For each city we therefore aim to list the visible remains individually, say which are open to the public and which are ticketed, and suggest a route that links them on foot. The main Roman urban centres in present-day Slovenia were Emona, Poetovio and Celeia; the entries below cover the ones we have documented so far.