The Ruins of Xanten

Xanten's temple.

To see what remains of the Romans in this corner of Europe, you take a train to Duisberg. There, you change trains and ride northwest, in the direction of the Netherlands.

You leave the Rhineland, and enter the Lower Rhine. As you ride to your destination — that train's last stop — the land flattens out, towns spread out with more cows grazing between them, the houses look more Dutch than German, and there are more signs selling raw herring.

After a nearly two-hour train ride, you're in Xanten, Germany.

The Roman ruins are in a fenced park just outside the small, old town. The fence runs along where the Roman city's walls once stood. There is a glass-and-steel museum, built over the remains of the Roman bathhouse. There's a temple, an amphitheatre, a rebuilt gate.

We arrived on a day when the park's staff had erected dozens of tents to house craftspeople making Roman-style leather and metalwork, carving stone blocks, and braiding hair in the Roman style. Kids were everywhere, trying the activities out.

Kids or not, it's a great afternoon out, especially on a sunny day.

"Are you not entertained?!?"

We've come across Roman ruins in Pecs, Hungary; Sofia, Bulgaria; Istria in Croatia; Trier, Germany; and, yes, Rome.

Considering the amount of ruins that can be visited across Europe, Rome's leftovers can seem as commonplace as McDonald's — for number of locations and their architectural consistency. I've seen two city gates now, a few temples, the colosseum, a few smaller colosseums, ampitheatres, a bathhouse, and various rocks, bricks, stones, column stubs, and ancient foundations.

It's not that I get tired of seeing it in so many places. It's the opposite: I'm in awe that I see them all over the place.

We can all appreciate the Romans' ability to build incredible feats of engineering without modern technology, but their ability to build these feats in so many places, and that so many have survived, is astonishing.

It takes hard work to achieve that kind of ancient standardization.

Much of the stone in Xanten was shipped in from quarries to the south. The town layout was in a grid pattern, with exact 90 degree angles. Xanten's gate was built to similar specifications of the gate in Trier. And it was linked with the rest of the Roman Empire by the roads that led to Rome, the rest of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

One of the great things about living in Europe is how close you live to history. Sometimes, you discover a slice of people's lives from a long time ago or bask in the glory of some medieval ruler. In rare cases, you're able to wrap your head around the scope of an ancient empire. 

The museum and the bathhouse exhibit, built to the bathhouse's specifications but with different materials.