He has white wine and red wine on offer. The “fine wines,” as he says, are at the front of the display: the sweet wine from Crete, for example, which “goes really well with dessert,” but which, with the exception of one bottle, was just bought by a wealthy customer from the surrounding area. Pompeianus Silvinus was a Roman from Augsburg who probably earned his money as a wine merchant, as can be seen from a relief on his tomb. The tomb actually exists, it is one of the numerous treasures of Augsburg city archaeology. Pompeianus Silvinus died a long time ago, but has now been resurrected – in the app “Augusta Vindelicum”, in which Augsburg wants to bring the city's Roman history closer to its visitors.
“A quarter of the city’s history is Roman history,” says cultural advisor Jürgen Enninger. “The Roman heritage deserves appropriate and appreciative visibility.” The once largest Roman settlement in what is now Bavaria has problems, especially with appropriate presentation; the Roman museum has had to be closed since 2012 due to static problems. The elaborately designed app is now intended to be a further step towards a new Roman museum that the city and the Free State want to create together – and which allows visitors to immerse themselves in Roman life as it once was through puzzles, augmented reality and life-like stories told based on excavation finds Everyday war in Augsburg.
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The developers have integrated eleven stations from the Roman past into the virtual tour, from the market hall, in which the wine merchant can also be seen fictitiously, to the thermal baths, the old city wall and a rich estate or a pottery settlement in the area around today's Augsburg. You can explore the app and thus the Roman history of Augsburg at home on the sofa, but users can also use it like a city guide, which has a decisive advantage: if you are standing on Kohlergasse not far from the Hofgarten, the app will hide the city wall and Its former course into today's environment. This gives the user, says city archaeologist Sebastian Gairhos, an impressive idea of how high the wall and its former city gates were – even in comparison to their later medieval counterparts, which were about the same height.
“The app offers us the opportunity to link the topography of the city and its surroundings with our finds,” says Gairhos. For example, the tomb of Marcus Aurelius Carus, who had it built during his lifetime and which archaeologists completely recovered in nine parts during construction work in 1998. Users of the app can color the tomb according to their wishes and view it from all sides. These interactive elements are a strength of the app, for example when users can browse through the kitchen of a rich estate resident in search of something sweet. Or when the app explains how a Roman thermal bath works or – back in the market hall – what the Romans ate and drank.
The market hall really existed, a monumental building that initially consisted of a wooden framework before being built as a stone building around 100 AD. In the app, the market hall is drawn as a 360-degree view; users are allowed to enter the wine shop, the ceramics shop and the grocery store, where they learn from an actual amphora that the Romans liked to use fish sauce for seasoning. They even transported large quantities of oysters alive on the well-developed roads or down the Lech, so that they arrived fresh in Augsburg. The Augsburg city archaeologists keep finding oyster shells, according to the information. Olive oil, on the other hand, as a quiz reveals, was not only used for cooking, but also as sun oil and for lighting in oil lamps.
The integrated games – whoever answers questions at each of the eleven stations can collect gold coins in the app – are intended to keep users engaged, says Cosima Götz from the city history department. That's not necessary: the app, which can be used in English and German, goes far beyond ordinary city guides in terms of functions. It's still not a museum, which the probably most important Roman city in modern-day Bavaria would need so urgently – but it's worth it not only for tourists, but also for locals.
