Roman-Germanic Museum

The Roman-Germanic Museum is Cologne's archaeological city museum, built in 1974 around an extraordinary in-situ find: a 3rd-century Dionysus mosaic discovered in 1941 during excavations for a wartime air-raid shelter. The mosaic — still resting on its original Roman floor — is visible through a dedicated viewing opening and comprises roughly 1.5 million individual tesserae, making it one of the most significant figurative mosaics surviving north of the Alps. The collection also includes the reconstructed tomb of Lucius Poblicius, a 15-meter-tall funerary monument for a 1st-century Roman veteran that offers a vivid sense of what the Roman colonia once looked like. Since 2019 the building has been undergoing major renovation; key pieces from the collection are on temporary display at the Belgisches Haus nearby. Even in its reduced state, the museum delivers an unusually direct encounter with the Roman foundations beneath modern Cologne.

Built over the Roman Dionysus mosaic — the largest collection of Roman glass in the world.