Overall Rating     ****     4 stars – almost complete early temple

Display                  *           1 – not much local information available

Access                    ***       in centre of city, parking difficult

Other                     Wow factor

In the centre of Vienne in the Place du Palais you can stumble across the Temple of Augustus and Livia.  This is an almost complete early Imperial Temple, and you will be amazed.  It was erected at the end of the 1st Century BCE and dedicated to Augustus.  In 41 CE Claudius rededicated it also to Augustus’ wife Livia his grandmother.  Claudius was born in nearby Lugdunum.

It owes its survival, like the Maison Carée in Nîmes to being converted to a Church after the Theodosian Decrees.  In the Revolution it was used for the Festival of Reason.  The columns on closer examination are scared by wall fastenings of earlier centuries.  It as restored in the 19th Century when the centuries of church were stripped from the fabric.  No chance of doing such drastic changes these days, so we should be pleased with the courage of those times.

This temple really impresses in its completeness, when you are used to temples surviving as just columns.  It is almost the equal of Nîmes and deserves to be better known.