The City Museum of Ljubljana is joining the celebration of 2000th anniversary of Emona, the first urban settlement in the area of today's Ljubljana, with the central museum exhibition “Emona: a City of the Empire”, which will be on display up to 30 May, 2015.

The Roman colony of Emona was the first actual city settlement in the area of today's Ljubljana. Like a precise machine linked with other cities and the capital, Rome, Emona was one of the engines that propelled the empire. With its universal form, architecture, way of life, laws and values the city educated its inhabitants into loyal Roman citizens. Its rituals, rules and everyday practices consolidated their common political, ideological and cultural identity.

The Emona: a City of the Empire exhibition will thus display the city's urban structure, its development, the relations within the colony among Roman newcomers and the native inhabitants and how the consciousness of being the citizen of Emona or a Roman had been reinforced. The exhibition will display a number of new archaeological findings and expert observations. It will also explore the Emona’s heritage, which started coming back to life in the 19th and 20th century. Comprehensive archaeological excavations and a wealth of objects, companies and projects that found their names in Ljubljana's Roman past will be on display (the Emona café, Emona store, the gramophone Emona, Rex type-writers, Ilirija swimming pool, Mercator Merkur, Kolosej, Millenium, Emporium, etc..)

Apart from a series of accompanying events, the Emona: a City of the Empire exhibition will also offer a bilingual Slovenian-English catalogue with professional articles and the catalogue section of the exhibits. The catalogue will be prepared by the experts from the City Museum of Ljubljana in collaboration with many renowned researchers of the Classical antiquity period from national and international institutions. The contributions emphasise the urbanity and monumentality as the key changes that Emona brings into the area of Ljubljana. The articles also present unpublished results of the latest archaeological excavations before they finally confront us with the prestige and misuse of the rich heritage of Emona in the 20th century.
Authors of the Emona: a City of the Empire exhibition are Bernarda Županek, PhD, curator of Classical antiquities and Irena Žmuc, MA, curator of the Modern area period.