Cologne; Tuesday, 19 December, 2006

Following a pig out at breakfast, I wandered down to the tram stop and caught the tram into town and onto the Hauptbahnhof. My destination for the day was Xanten, after Cologne the most important surviving Roman town in Germany, and about the only one that hasn't been built upon.

The journey is quite slow as you have to change in Duisburg and wait nearly 30 minutes (made even longer when you find out that the train to Duisburg does stop at the Köln Messe/Deutz station that is 5 minutes walk from the hotel, and you need not have spent 45 minutes getting to the Hauptbahnhof because of engineering works on the tram lines!). The final part of the journey is on a little branch line out to Xanten which wanders its way through the German countryside, at times almost invisible through thick fog, but as the train came out of the only tunnel on the line, and the on board computerised announcements came out with 'Die nächste haltestelle ist Xanten, Das Zug endet dort.' the sky had cleared and there were large patches of blue.

According to the guidebooks, it is about a 10 to 15 minute walk from the station to the centre of town. As usual, this was wildly inaccurate, 5 minutes after leaving the station I was standing in the market square looking at the impressive cathedral church that dominates the town. Inside is no less impressive and you are given an insight into what all really old churches would look like if they never had reformations or threw stuff out, it's a hotchpotch of aisles, alters, alter screens and choirs, more soberingly, in the crypt is a small display to some of the residents of the area who met their deaths during the Nazi time in the concentration camps. The back of the Crypt wall has blocks with the names of some of the more infamous camps - Bergen Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz - etched into them and then covered with barbed wire, it suddenly reminds you that it wasn't that long ago.

The modern town of Xanten is built on the edge of a much older settlement. Colonia Ulpia Traiana was built here in around 70AD and occupied for at least 200 years. Today only the foundations of a few of the buildings remain, and that would be all, if the site hadn't been 'Disnyfied'. Archaeologists have attempted reconstruction's of some of the buildings on their original foundations, based on findings elsewhere and an element of guess work.

The results are actually quite impressive with parts of the Roman wall, a villa, amphitheatre and temple all open for visitors to look around, and in most places you can still see the remains of the buildings, the temple, for example, is almost floating on modern building methods over the roman remains of it’s original foundations. The site is massive, and not all has survived, as the main road bypassing the town cuts a swathe through the middle of the site. On the opposite side of the road is probably the most impressive remains, mostly because they haven't rebuilt, instead they have encased it in a glass structure to preserve the remains of one of the largest bath houses ever discovered. You can walk around inside and get a feel for how the Romans relaxed.

After spending several hours wandering around Roman remains, and with a blister doing a good representation of the size of the Roman empire throbbing on my foot I hobbled back to the station and caught the train back to Duisburg, and then back to Cologne.