Roman necropolises

Romans buried their dead outside the town, along the roads leading in and out of it. At Emona, for example, the cemeteries lay along the northern, western and eastern thoroughfares, on the roads from Celeia, Aquileia and Neviodunum. A traveller approaching a Roman town passed the tombs of its citizens before reaching its gate.

That habit is good news for visitors today. Cemeteries sat on open ground beside roads, so they sometimes escaped the rebuilding that buried the towns themselves. The graves range from simple pits to elaborate tombs on masonry foundations, decorated with marble sculpture showing the owners and scenes from mythology. When a site was excavated rather than merely recorded, the best pieces usually ended up in a museum; in a few places, they have been rebuilt where they stood.

The necropolis at Šempeter in the Savinja valley is the outstanding example in this region. It stretched for more than a kilometre along the Roman road between Emona and Celeia, was in use from about the mid-1st century until the 3rd century, and owes its survival to a disaster: a flood of the Savinja toppled the monuments nearest the river and buried them in gravel. Four marble tombs have been reconstructed in an open-air park there, together with a stretch of the road itself.

Entries of this type aim to tell you which monuments are on site and which are in the local museum, whether the ground is open or fenced, and how the site relates to the town it served, where that town is known at all.