A complete guide for the attentive traveler · France 2025 series
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The Roman bridge over the Ouvèze, in use since the first century AD.
Most Roman towns in Provence began as an act of force. Orange was laid out for veterans of the Second Legion. Arles was handed to the men of the Sixth. Land was confiscated, a grid was surveyed, walls went up, and Rome arrived whether the neighbors liked it or not. It is easy to picture the whole region that way: a sunny reward for old soldiers, a place to send them so they would stay out of trouble in Rome.
Vaison is the exception, and that is the reason to come. The Vocontii, the Gallic people whose capital this was, lost a war to Rome in the 120s BC and then did something shrewd. They signed a treaty. Their territory became a civitas foederata, an allied state that kept its own laws and its own magistrates. No colony was planted here and no legion retired here. Nobody ever built a city wall, because nobody needed one. Over the next two centuries the local families made themselves Roman by choice and at their own expense, in houses bigger than the grandest in Pompeii.
Then the traffic ran the other way. Instead of Rome sending its men to Provence, Vaison sent its sons to Rome, and one of them ended up running the empire for a teenage Nero.
What survives is the largest archaeological site in France open to visitors, about fifteen hectares of streets, shops, baths, gardens and a working theatre, plus a one-arched bridge that has carried traffic for two thousand years. Most people give it a morning. This guide covers the highlights, the details most visitors walk past, and a way to spend the evening once the gates close.
The Highlights
The ruins sit in two parks on either side of Avenue Général de Gaulle, a few steps from the tourist office. One ticket covers both, along with the museum and the theatre. Start with Puymin, the hillside park to the east, where the ticket desk is.
Puymin: the House of the Arbour
Just inside the gate lies the House of the Laurelled Apollo, named for a marble head found in it and now in the museum. Its reception room still has a floor of coloured marble. Notice where the house stops: its southern half runs under the modern street, which is true of most of ancient Vasio. You are looking at the part of the city that happened to lie under gardens and fields.
Walk on to the Maison à la Tonnelle, the House of the Arbour, and read the low walls as a floor plan. This was a farmhouse that the city grew around. By the second century it had become a mansion of about 3,000 square metres, terraced up the slope, with an enclosed garden, a pool set in a curved recess, a double staircase to the family rooms above, and a service yard on the street side where deliveries came in. The site panel maps a kitchen with an oven and a millstone, a private bath suite, and a row of latrines. The owners were not Roman officials posted to Gaul. They were local landowners who had decided what a good life looked like.
The House of the Arbour: a farm that became a 3,000 m² town mansion.
The theatre
Climb to the top of the hill and the theatre opens below you, cut into the north slope in the first century AD, probably under Claudius. It held around 6,000 people. The seating you see was rebuilt in the 1930s, and the stage wall is long gone, which makes it the mirror image of Orange, where the wall survives and the seats were restored. Look up instead. A few columns of the portico that crowned the top row still stand against the sky, a rare survival.
The floor in front of the stage is where the story turns. In 1912 the excavators opened the pits that once held the curtain machinery and found emperors lying in them: Claudius, Domitian, Hadrian and his wife Sabina, in white marble, toppled from the stage wall and buried. You will meet them in the museum.
The theatre has never really retired. A dance festival and a choral festival use it every summer. On our visit a crane was swinging stage trusses into place for the season, with a forklift parked where the chorus once stood.
Rebuilt seats, original hillside, and the last columns of the upper portico.
Musée Théo Desplans
The museum sits in the middle of Puymin and is included in the ticket. It is small, cool, and better than it has any right to be. The labels are mostly in French, so it helps to know what you are looking for.
The imperial room. Four marble figures from the theatre stand against a deep blue wall. Domitian wears a general’s breastplate. Claudius wears an oak-leaf crown. Sabina is wrapped and veiled like a respectable Roman matron. Hadrian, the great admirer of all things Greek, is shown as a Greek hero, which is to say wearing nothing at all. A provincial town put its emperor on stage naked and meant it as the highest compliment.
The Peacock mosaic. Lifted from a villa on the far side of the hill, it fills a sunken floor: a great medallion of hexagons, each holding a bird, around a peacock on a red ground. Walk the border and count the patterns. Knots, meanders, vine scrolls and shields, no two sides quite alike.
The silver bust. A third-century portrait of a local grandee in beaten silver, found in 1924 in the house that now carries its name. That same year the town council voted to add “la-Romaine” to the name Vaison. The Roman identity you see on every road sign is barely a century old.
Domitian in armour, with Sabina, Hadrian and Claudius behind. All four were found in the theatre in 1912.
La Villasse: the street of shops
Cross the avenue to the second park. It is quieter than Puymin and, for my money, the better half. A paved street runs straight ahead of you: big limestone slabs for carts, and on the west side a raised pavement that once ran under the upper floors of the buildings, carried on the columns whose stumps line the kerb. Shops opened onto that arcade. Stand in the roadway and you are in a first-century high street with the awnings taken down.
The Rue des Boutiques at La Villasse. Carts in the middle, shoppers under the colonnade.
On the left rises the one tall thing in the park, a great stone arch from the public baths. Opposite stands the House of the Silver Bust, about 5,000 square metres of rooms, courts and gardens. For scale, the House of the Faun, the largest in Pompeii, covers roughly 3,000. A headless marble figure in heavy drapery still stands in its paved court.
Keep going to the House of the Dolphin, the “small” one at 2,700 square metres. Its garden court has been replanted with rosemary and lavender around a long stone basin, with the columns of the peristyle set back up around it. Line the columns up with the square bell tower of the cathedral behind and you have twelve centuries in one frame.
The House of the Dolphin, with the tower of Notre-Dame de Nazareth beyond.
Hidden Gems
The tunnel. Behind the theatre a passage about the height of a tall man runs straight through the rock of the hill. It is Roman, cut so that the crowd could reach the theatre from the town side without climbing over the top. The tool marks are still in the walls. Almost everybody walks through it without knowing how old it is.
The Roman tunnel under Puymin hill.
The latrine bench. In La Villasse, look for a long stone bench with a row of keyhole-shaped openings. Roman toilets were communal and sociable, with running water beneath. It is the most photographed object in the park that nobody puts on a postcard.
The masks. In the museum’s room of tombs, two stone faces with open mouths and tall peaked hair hang on a red wall. They are tragic theatre masks, and the high hairpiece has a name, the onkos. A town that loved its theatre carried the image to the grave. A cast of one stands on a plinth in the herb garden you pass on the way to the cathedral.
A bronze Claudius. Overlooking La Villasse, a modern bronze of a seated emperor rests on a plinth marked simply CLAUDE. He earned the seat. Claudius was born in Lyon, and in AD 48 he stood up in the Senate and argued that the leading men of Gaul should be allowed to join it. Vaison is what he was talking about.
Rome under the cathedral. Notre-Dame de Nazareth, five minutes west of La Villasse, is an eleventh- and twelfth-century church built directly on Roman remains. Go inside and look for the railed pit where a fluted Roman column still stands below floor level. Then walk around the outside of the apse, where the foundations are made of reused Roman blocks. On the smooth ashlar higher up, hunt for the masons’ marks: a cross here, a letter A there, each one a medieval stonecutter signing for his day’s pay.
A Roman column standing below the floor of the cathedral.
The Men Vaison Sent to Rome
The treaty paid off within a few generations. Pompeius Trogus, whose grandfather had been given citizenship by Pompey and whose father served as a secretary to Julius Caesar, wrote the first history of the world in Latin, and pointedly made it a history of everyone except the Romans.
Sextus Afranius Burrus went further. Born here around the year 1, he managed estates for the empress Livia, then for Tiberius and Claudius, and in AD 51 became sole commander of the Praetorian Guard. When Nero came to the throne at sixteen, Burrus and the philosopher Seneca governed for him, and the first years of the reign were remembered as a model of good administration. An inscription found in Vaison names Burrus as the town’s patron. A boy from an allied Gallic town with no walls had become one of the two most powerful men in Rome.
The Priest and the Tobacco Baron
For most of its history, Vaison had no idea what it was standing on. Two arches of the theatre poked out of a hillside. The bridge was simply the bridge. In 1907 a young priest from Avignon, Joseph Sautel, began digging at his own expense. He kept at it until his death in 1955, and nearly everything you visit today is his work.
A priest’s salary does not move a hillside. The money came from Maurice Burrus, an Alsatian tobacco manufacturer and member of parliament who fell for the town and paid for the excavations and the rebuilding of the theatre. Yes, Burrus. The patron who brought Roman Vaison back to light shared a name with the man who carried it to Rome. The street that runs past the ticket office is the Rue Burrus, and you can decide for yourself which of the two it honours.
Three Towns, One Bridge
Vaison has moved house three times. The Celtic town sat on the rock south of the river. The Roman town spread across the flat north bank, open and unfortified. In the Middle Ages, when the Counts of Toulouse and the local bishops fought over the place and an open town became a dangerous one, the people climbed back up the rock and rebuilt under a castle. The plain went to gardens, and the Roman city sank quietly under them. From 1274 until the Revolution the town belonged to the popes. Only in the nineteenth century did Vaison come down again, onto the very ground that hid its past.
The one piece that never stopped working is the Roman bridge. A single arch a little over seventeen metres across and nine metres wide, it was built in the first century AD and was for most of that time the only crossing between the two towns.
The medieval upper town from the gravel bed of the Ouvèze.
On 22 September 1992, after a day of violent rain upstream, the Ouvèze rose about fifteen metres in a few hours. Thirty-seven people died in Vaison. Campsites and houses were swept away, and newer bridges along the river were damaged or destroyed. The water reached the deck of the Roman bridge and tore away its parapet. The arch did not move. The parapet you lean on today is the replacement, and beside the bridge a small iron plate reads CRUE DU 22 09 92, with a line showing where the river stood. Find it, then look down at the stream below.
The flood mark of 22 September 1992. The river is the green ribbon at lower left.
A Golden Hour Wander Guide
The archaeological parks close at 6:00 PM in the warm months, and in May and June the sun is up for another three hours. Everything on this route is free and open.
After the gates close: La Villasse from the outside. Walk the pavement along the edge of the park. Much of the site is visible over the railings, and the low sun rakes across the columns of the House of the Dolphin in a way midday never does.
About 90 minutes before sunset: the cathedral lawn. The west front of Notre-Dame de Nazareth sits behind a pair of plane trees. The stone is pale gold at this hour, and the masons’ marks stand out in the slanting light.
About an hour before sunset: the river bed. Paths lead down to the gravel bars of the Ouvèze below the bridge. From here you get the whole composition: the arch, the cliff, the houses of the upper town stacked above, and a faded painted sign for a lime works on an old factory wall. Stay off the gravel if there has been heavy rain upstream.
At sunset: cross the bridge and climb. Go up through the gate into the Haute-Ville and keep climbing past the belfry, with its wrought-iron bell cage, to the foot of the ruined castle. The lanes are steep and cobbled, so wear real shoes. Mont Ventoux fills the horizon to the southeast, and the Roman town lies below you in the last light.
The upper town and its belfry above the Ouvèze.
After dark: back to Place Montfort. The main square of the lower town is ringed with café terraces under plane trees. We ended up at Brasserie Le Montfort over a pizza and a Trappist ale, which is not Provençal but was exactly right.
Good to Know Before You Go
- Ticket: one pass covers Puymin, La Villasse, the theatre and the museum, and is valid for 24 hours. Adults €9, ages 10 to 17 €4, under 10 free. Buy it at the Puymin entrance beside the tourist office.
- Hours: April to September 9:30 AM to 6:00 PM without a break. March and October 10:00 to 12:30 and 2:00 to 5:30. November, December and February 10:00 to 12:00 and 2:00 to 5:00. Closed from 1 January to early February.
- Cathedral and cloister: the cathedral is free. The cloister next door has usually been bundled with the pass. Ask at the ticket desk.
- Time: two and a half to three hours for both parks and the museum. A full day if you add the cathedral, the bridge and the upper town.
- Shade and water: Puymin has trees. La Villasse has almost none. Bring a hat and a bottle.
- Market day: Tuesday morning, one of the biggest markets in Provence, held under a papal charter of 1483. Wonderful, and it fills every parking space in town. Arrive before 9:00 or come another day for the ruins.
- Getting there: no railway. Vaison is about 28 km northeast of Orange, with a bus from Orange station taking around 50 minutes. Rick Steves uses the town as his home base for the Côtes du Rhône wine villages, and it works well that way: Séguret, Gigondas and Rasteau are all a short drive.
- Confirm before you travel: hours and prices change. The town’s heritage office posts the current ones at provenceromaine.com.
Key Takeaways for the Attentive Traveler
- Vaison was an ally, not a colony. No veterans, no walls. Its people chose to become Roman, and the size of their houses tells you how well that went.
- Do both parks. Puymin has the theatre and museum, but La Villasse has the street, and the street is where the city comes alive.
- See the museum after the ruins, not before. The emperors mean more once you have stood where they fell.
- The name “la-Romaine” dates from 1924. The Roman city was rediscovered by a priest and paid for by a tobacco baron named Burrus.
- Finish on the bridge. Everything else here was lost and found again. The bridge has simply been at work the whole time.