LEGO Rome

As commonly known "Lego Rome was not built in a day..." but you can find on this page everything we did up to this day and over the course of the past years about Roman history.

The Colosseum was built in 2018 as an entry for an LEGO community contest. The model is designed in the style of the LEGO Architecture line and resembles one of the most iconic buildings of the classical age, that still continues to characterize the Italian capital's modern-day cityscape.

The model has a footprint of 36x28 studs and overall consists of 2149 parts. The images show that the model has a distinct colour scheme and design that follows the style of the archtitecture series. Yet, our background in classical studies has propelled us to stay as true as possible to the building's contemporary look, we achieved this by first drafting a CAD-version of the Colosseum as it may have looked like after its completion nearly two thousand years ago (see the rendered pictures highlighted in bright red at the bottom), and then extracting bricks that have gone missing since then to produce the actual built model (photographs of the model highlighted in dark red).

Public BRICKstory's very first project was the recreation in LEGO of the Roman Villa Urbana in Heitersheim, South Germany. In partnership with the city of Heitersheim and the local Roman museum we built a 2,40x2,40 metre model of the Villa after reference of the exhibited model in 2017. The interior was modelled after references from Pompeii and plausability and was realised in the following year.

For more information on this huge aspect our project, please take a closer look on the Blog entries about this model and the origins of Public BRICKstory:

Part 1: Initial Steps

Part 2: Plans & Preparations

Part 3: Building Sessions, Opening and the Media

More articles about the interior are planned, as well as a subpage for this huge aspect of Public BRICKstory.

When LEGO released the Roman Legionary in 2012, the demand for this minifigure was very huge (which ultimately lead to an extreme high market value and rarity). We were fortunate enough to get our hands on a large number of them and it was pretty obvious, that a Roman Testudo formation had to be done.

More on this topic in an upcoming blog-article. See other very well executed testudo formations  by Michael Jasper & legophthalmos.

In close proximity to the Villa was presumably a Gallo-Roman temple, where the deity Diana Abnoba was whorshipped. The remains of this temple couldn't be excavated, because the chapel/church of the Hospitaller castle lies directly above it.

For the third year of the exhibition we decided to create this temple for the museum. It will be realised via sponsorship by the visitors, who can buy a brick and put it in place on the model.

In 2017 we hosted a project at a school in Bad Krozingen, South Germany about the city and castle of Staufen in medieval times. As a part of this project we recreated a Roman watchtower, mostly built aside the Limes, the border fortification. It is believed, that one of this watchtowers or a similar kind of outpost stood at the location of the later castle.

The model featured, like its historical reference, a storage room in the basement, crew's quarters on the first floor and armory plus circumferential gallery as well as some Limes-like palisade. Two sides of the model shows the facade of the tower, while the other two are open to allow an look on the interior and details.