Rubbish is Lausanne museum attraction
A 2,000-year-old pile of rubbish is one of the attractions of a new permanent exhibition at the Roman museum in Lausanne.
The rubbish – consisting mostly of jugs – is one of many additions to the collection, which shows the many facets of everyday life in Lousanna, as the city was called during Roman times.
Lousanna was established in 15 BC as a regional trading centre because of its strategic position on routes between northern and southern Europe. It had a population of about 2,000, compared with 125,000 today, and its focus was Vidy on the shore of Lake Geneva.
The museum is on the site where the first systematic excavation of Roman remains was begun in the early 1930s.
Among the finds discovered since then and exhibited in the museum are bronze dishes in almost perfect condition, ornate jewellery and 70 gold coins known as the “Vidy treasure”, unearthed in 1936.
The exhibition shows how its Helvetian population lived under Roman rule, with tools indicating how the town was built and how its houses were equipped.
It also reveals to what extent Lausanne has retained many aspects of life in Lousanna, from architecture to the cultivation of the vineyards surrounding the city.
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