Isis Heiligtum (Isis and Magna Mater Temple) in Mainz, Germany
What do you do when you've built a shopping mall but you find an ancient Roman temple underneath part of it? If you are in Mainz, Germany, you build the mall up around it, but leave it in place to be a hidden museum to the past. This is the "Isis-Heiligtum" (Isis Temple) in Mainz, Germany, preserved in place beneath the Römerpassage shopping mall within an easy 10-minute walk from Mainz Hauptbahnhof train station. Go downstairs into a space where you will walk over transparent glass walkways around the edges of a dual temple to Isis and Cybele (Magna Mater in Rome), two "foreign" goddesses who had considerable attention in the Roman Empire. L earn about the people who visited and worked at the temple, and an unsettling number of magical items that were buried in its grounds to curse and bless various people. Celebrate the Saturnalia with a disembodied voiceover and some cheesy videos, and enjoy this well-designed small museum in a very unexpected location. How many ancient goddesses have a modern shopping mall as a storefront?
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