Vienne

We headed north from our overnight stop to Vienne on the Rhône river. This was a very Roman town and we visited the museum with archeological site next to it.

The area has been a bit of waste ground in 1960 and it had been difficult to grow things there as every time they tried to plant something some building materials were found under the soil.

So they decided to build a school - and found lots of mosaics and building foundations. That’s when the archeologists were called in who found a whole Roman town.

There were amazing mosaics in the museum.

They had set up room layouts with chairs and tables so you could get a feel for how it would have looked.

Also they had recipes that the Roman’s would have made - all containing garum - the pungent fish sauce that they fermented in barrels. The recipes were:

Hard boiled eggs with pine nuts

Broad beans with leeks, herbs, wine - and garum

Ham in pastry

We then went out in the heat to walk up the Roman streets and see the foundations of the buildings.

Vienne has a complete Roman temple on the other side of the river that we didn’t see. It had been incorporated into a building hundreds of years ago - so that when they removed the additions, they found the temple underneath. Here is a view of the town.

We then drove north to Lyon to our campsite for the night. We had a cooling swim in their large swimming pool and then salmon and veg on the bbq for dinner.