Mosaïques Orbe
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Five roofs, nine floors

What you see

A reception pavilion, four rooms over the mosaics, a model, and the plain all around.

Architecture

Pavilions, not a new palace

The museum does not imitate Rome. It sets five volumes of timber, rammed earth and glass over the floors, high enough to walk, dark enough for the tesserae to keep their colour.

The reception pavilion holds the villa model and a twelve-minute film. From there a gravel path leads to the four rooms.

You move on a glass ramp. You do not walk on the mosaics. You hover close enough to count the tesserae.

The route

Allow two hours, without hurrying. The rooms are not visited out of order: the story goes from geometry to myth.

Reception pavilion

Model of the pars urbana, film, cloakroom. First you grasp the scale: 200 metres of façade, 16 hectares.

Pavilion I

Eastern triclinium, laurel leaves, fragment of the western triclinium. Entering the villa through the reception rooms.

Pavilion II

Triton and Labyrinth. Myth and sea. The most wounded fragments, and among the most beautiful.

Pavilions III and IV

Rustic procession, squares and lozenges, then the gods of the week. The estate, the calendar, the sky.

Pavilion V

Achilles on Skyros, open only on heritage days and guided visits.

Conservation

Hélène Vuilleumier

Site curator. An archaeologist by training, she led the last pavilion consolidation campaign and keeps the climate journal of the floors.

In this demo her account opens the full museum administration: pages, media, team.

Mediation

Marc Dutoit

Cultural mediator. He leads school visits and Saturday tours. He does not write the site pages: he reads them with visitors.

In this demo his account has restricted rights: see, comment, not publish.

Visit notes

You expect a small village museum. You leave feeling you have walked through a villa.

Clara M.

August visit

The children looked for Mars for twenty minutes. We could not leave the labyrinth.

The Borel family

Sunday in June

The silence under the timber roof is worth as much as the tesserae. Rare, in Switzerland, a place this exact.

N. T.

Architect, Lausanne

Come

Open from May to October. Parking at the start of the path. Orbe station then twenty minutes on foot, or the post bus.

Hours, prices, access