Musée Départemental Arles Antique

The Musée départemental Arles antique is the archaeology museum of Arles in Provence, run by the Bouches-du-Rhône department, on the peninsula where the city's Roman circus once stood on the bank of the Rhône. It tells the story of Arles from prehistory to late antiquity and suits anyone visiting the town's UNESCO-listed Roman monuments.

Henri Ciriani's blue enamelled building

Henri Ciriani designed the building on a triangular plan, completed in 1995, and clad its walls in blue enamelled panels, which earned it the nickname Musée bleu. In 2016 it was also recognised as a maritime museum, because it holds the largest collection of finds from underwater digs in France. Remains of the Roman circus lie beside it.

A 31 metre Roman barge raised from the Rhône

The museum's best known exhibit is Arles Rhône 3, a flat-bottomed Roman river barge 31 metres long found in the Rhône in 2004. It was raised in 2011, conserved, and put on show in 2013 in an 800 square metre wing built for it, together with its cargo and objects recovered from the riverbed. The display explains how goods moved along the river in Roman times.

Augustus, mosaics and a bust thought to be Caesar

Roman sculpture is the core of the collection. A statue of Augustus about 3.10 metres tall, whose torso was found in 1750, stands among mosaics, inscriptions and early Christian sarcophagi. A marble bust thought to show Julius Caesar was recovered from the Rhône in 2007. Scale models, including a 1/100 model of the amphitheatre, show the ancient city, and seeing them first makes the monuments in town easier to read. The exhibition Le Passage de Vénus ran from 24 April to 31 October 2026.