We have studied the low-energy excitations in a minimalistic protected Josephson circuit which contains two basic elements (rhombi) characterized by the $pi$ periodicity of the Josephson energy. Novel design of these elements, which reduces their sen
sitivity to the offset charge fluctuations, has been employed. We have observed that the life time $T_{1}$ of the first excited state of this quantum circuit in the protected regime is increased up to $70mu s$, a factor of $sim100$ longer than that in the unprotected state. The quality factor $omega_{01}T_{1}$ of this qubit exceeds $10^{6}$ . Our results are in agreement with theoretical expectations; they demonstrate the feasibility of symmetry protection in the rhombi-based qubits fabricated with existing technology.
