Nowadays the micro - regional study of the Roman civilization is flourishing. The international historiography is following a tendency of secularization - religion, history and even archaeological monographs are focusing only on a small sections of the Empire and its history.
Cities are very popular nowadays. Many of them laying under modern urban centers (2000 ancient Roman cities represents a huge amount of urban archaeology!). Their heritage
is important not only for archaeologists, but also for local tourism, muzeology, politics, culture and entertainment. Many of the small towns or cities included the Roman past and heritage in their own city - image and local PR program. It's about money and business. Modern, urban archaeology – although, is facing with a serious change of paradigms – has a bright future. It can be a part of modern urban policies and cultural programs. Many of the big cities – such as London, Köln, Rome, Paris, Tarragona – included his archaeological heritage in their own touristic imaginary.
Roman cities became also a very important topic of research again (after a highly popular period of the 80-90’s). Big ERC projects and international, digital maps are created, working on the social, political, economic and religious life of the cities.
In many cases, modern, 3D models of Roman cities are serving the popularization of this ancient heritage, which helps a lot to understand the local history of the city by their own inhabitants and also serve the globalized tourism and struggling academics.
The example of Köln (Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium), Carnuntum, Budapest (Aquincum), London (Londinium), Paris (Lutetia Parisiorum), Tarragona (Tarraco) should serve an example also for the Romanian cities, such as Alba Iulia (Apulum),Cluj (Napoca) or Turda (Potaissa).
New corpuses, cathalogues (CSIR, digitized stone monuments, new museum guides and open air panels) and 3D reconstructions, digital and dynamic maps (GIS) would serve not only the archaeology, but also the tourism.
Here you can find some successful examples from all over the Roman Empire:
Pompeii (numerous parallel projects!)
