City Museum of Ljubljana

The City Museum of Ljubljana occupies the Turjak Palace at Gosposka ulica 15, a Baroque townhouse in the centre of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The institution was founded in the 1930s to document the history of the city, and the palace was substantially renovated in the early 2000s to create a modern museum interior while keeping the historic shell. The permanent exhibition follows the story of Ljubljana from prehistory through the Roman, medieval, Habsburg and twentieth-century periods, using archaeological finds, models, documents and reconstructions. Its best-known object is the wooden wheel found in the Ljubljana Marsh, dated to roughly 5,100 years ago and counted among the oldest wheels with an axle ever discovered, which makes it a landmark in the history of technology in Europe. Visitors also meet material from Emona, the Roman colony founded in the early first century CE on the site of the modern city, including everyday objects, inscriptions and fragments of buildings. The museum is arranged chronologically with a thematic layer: rooms present the marshland pile-dwellers, the Roman city, the medieval and early modern town, and the modern capital. Part of the visit takes place below ground level, where archaeological remains discovered during the building works, including a section of a Roman road, are displayed in situ. The display uses Slovenian and English text, and the combination of conserved original structures and contemporary design is a defining characteristic of the museum. The palace has been conserved in stages, and the underground area is kept as a controlled archaeological space. Admission is about EUR 6-7. The museum is a good introduction to the city before walking through the old town, the market and along the Ljubljanica river, because it explains why the settlement developed where it did. It lies close to the Roman wall remains and the main shopping streets, and can be combined with a stroll to Congress Square and the National Museum of Slovenia.