An exhibition currently at the National Museum of Archaeology in Republic Street Valletta includes as its main feature the full-scale model of a Roman city.

Complete with theatres, fora, and all that composed a Roman city in or around the third century of the Christian era, this is Viminacium, a city that guarded a stretch of the Danube.

It is not all uncovered, as the model would make you think, as a large part still lies underground. But the model gives the viewer a glimpse of a Roman city at the heyday of Roman power, when the might of Rome stretched from Scotland to Turkey.

The exhibition is called Itinerarium Romanum Serbiae and is backed by the Serbian government keen to show Serbia’s Roman past and therefore its right to be included in Europe.

Viminacium was the capital city of Upper Moesia and is almost at the centre of a vast region which ranges from Croatia in the north, to Bulgaria and Macedonia in the south, which are seeking international recognition from UNESCO as a world heritage site for its Roman remains.

The exhibition also reminds viewers that no less than 18 Roman Emperors were born in that region, including some of Rome’s greatest emperors such as Trajan, Aurelian, culminating in Constantine himself.

This exhibition also marks the first appearance in public of the Malta Serbian community which has given Malta not just footballers, as Minister Owen Bonnici joked, but also surgeons and nurses.