Roman house opens Sunday after Lm180,000 upgrade

The Roman house in Rabat, closed for refurbishment for the past three years, will open to the public on Sunday.

A fully-fledged rehabilitation of the house, officially known as Domus Romana, just outside Mdina cost Lm180,000. The tag Roman Villa with which the house is still saddled is a misnomer.

An electronic turnstile - the first to be installed by Heritage Malta at one of its sites - is being used to exercise greater control on who enters and leaves the site.

This is the first museum Heritage Malta will be inaugurating since it was set up a year ago, the organisation's public programmes manager Pierre Cassar said.

Projects manager Martin Spiteri explained that all the artefacts that could be moved were taken away from the Roman house to be cleaned and consolidated in collaboration with the restoration centre in Bighi.

Consolidation means that those objects that were flaking or in danger of breaking apart were treated with special glues that are reversible. This in turn means that the glue will be easily removed if the need arises.

Likewise the mosaics were cleaned and consolidated.

A series of interpretation panels in English and Maltese give the history of the Roman house since its discovery in 1881 when government workers digging up the ground to plant trees in the nearby area known as Howard Gardens came across skeletons and mosaics.

The discovery led archaeologists, among them Temi Zammit, to start recording details of the finds. The neo classical portico was built in the 1920s.

Another aid to visitors is gallery site sheets in seven languages - German, French, Spanish, Italian, English, Maltese and Chinese - providing details about the artefacts on display.

The house is fully accessible to people with special needs.

The visitor flow is such that no group will clash with another. Visitors who go through the house end up in a shop where they can buy mementoes and then leave the place through a door that is separate from the main entrance.

On their way out, at the back of the house, visitors will be able to view at close quarters the open-air site containing other Roman remains on top of which a Saracen cemetery had been found, dating back about 1,000 years.

The curator of archaeology Sue Depasquale, who started the project, explained that the place had to be rewired because the electricity system had been installed in the 1920s.

Rainwater also used to seep through the roof. The other problem was the lack of intellectual accessibility. This made it difficult for visitors to make head or tail of the exhibits because a substantial number of them had not been found at the house itself but were funerary and agricultural items.

"Only those artefacts connected with a Roman house were retained. The rest have been stored and will eventually be displayed in other sites.

"Apart from this, dust and damp found their way into the old showcases damaging the exhibits. Moreover, traffic close by caused the exhibits to vibrate and move along the display cabinets.

"The highlight of the house is the mosaic which covered the floor of the courtyard that served for rain water catchment," Ms Depasquale added.

Some of the exhibits date even earlier than Roman times, going back to two or three centuries BC although the mosaic dates back to one century BC and one century AD.

The entrance fee to the Roman house, which will be open seven days a week, is Lm2.50 for adults; Lm1.25 for students and senior citizens and 75c for children aged between six and 11.