Barcelona’s City History Museum is in a former royal palace. There’s a pretty chapel and a big fancy gothic room, which is fine if that’s what you’re into. Oh! I just read in the guidebook that the room is where Ferdinand and Isabel received Columbus when he came back from America. I might have been more impressed if I’d known that at the time.
But the more impressive thing about this museum is what’s below it. Barcelona, like a lot of cities in Europe, was once a Roman settlement. You can see bits of the Roman walls around town and the city stands on layer after layer of older buildings. From the ground level of the museum, you take an elevator down to this fantastic subterranean world of Roman ruins. Raised walkways go along Roman walls, into a sentry tower, through a dye shop, past a pool from a public bath, over a garum factory (more on garum later), past the remains of early Christian buildings, and through a huge winery.
This is a storefront along a real Roman road. Behind it is the dye factory, where the Romans did, oh, laundry and stuff. And dying fabric. The museum had a great audio tour, which was excellent at the time but means I couldn’t take pictures of wall text to remind myself what I was seeing. (Could I have taken notes? Yes. Did I? No.)
Here’s one thing I do remember: They used urine in the dye process, so they would have had big jars to collect contributions from passersby. I know, ew. Roman cities must have smelled awful. I just read something that pointed out how little bathing would have helped, too–I mean, it’s not like they had chlorination then. Everybody brought whatever bodily fluids, dirt, and bugs they had encountered since their last bath and shared them with the whole town through the excellent dispersal medium of nice warm water.
Speaking of things that are smelly, Roman food depended on something called garum. Garum is what happens when you mush up fish and let them ferment in these tanks.
Garum is required if you’re going to pull off any ancient Roman recipes. Imagine if you were 2000 years in the future and trying to make a recipe that called for ketchup or Worcestershire sauce. I mean, where would you start? Garum is like that.
One more thing from that museum. They had mounted a series of funeral portraits, dug up when archaeologists were excavating the Roman walls in the 1960s and 1970s. The whole point of these portraits was to make sure the memory of these people lives on forever, and, as the label points out, they did it! Here they are, 2000 years later, looking you right in the eye.
Way to go, citizens.
