sunday drive: bad vilbel or designer bath

 Since indulging in Roman history, I have become quite keen on exploring what legacies there are to be discovered in these far reaches of the empire and I had the chance to explore Bad Vilbel, built over the foundations of a Roman settlement. The hidden past of this spa town, source of the Hassia label of water and home to its bottling-works, was only revealed in the mid-1800s during excavations to expand the regional railway network when a villa and spectacularly the floor of a Roman bathhouse was uncovered.
 Though the major extant portions of the detailed mosaic tile-work is conserved in museums around the world, artists and archeologists have reconstructed the floor exactly as it was found in situ, under a shallow pool contained within a pavilion and accompanied with artefacts and original tiles as part of the puzzle.
The design is similar to what H and I saw preserved in the Baths of Caracalla on the outskirts of Rome and features some equally fantastic creatures from Neptune's domain, including a Quinotaur, a bull bearing a trident and hence the five horns. The place was pretty interesting besides, too. Bad Vilbel is a town of wells and fountains and also features exhibitions on that subject and a rocky conic that illustrates to scale the geological strata above ground-water.
There was also a very fine ruined Wasserburg on a bayou of the River Nidda (the tributary of the Main named after the nearby Roman town of Nida, in today's suburb of Frankfurt-Heddernheim—heathens' home, remembering vaguely those old occupiers, like the Heathen Wall in Wiesbaden that is a remnant of a complex Roman aqueduct system) that serves as an open-air venue for concerts and theatrical productions.