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| The Roman ruins at Dougga, Tunisia |
Virtually nothing remains of the old Phoenician Carthage of Hannibal and the Punic Wars. The city had cost Rome perhaps one-quarter of a million of her best men; no wonder the statesman Cato the Elder ended every speech he made with the words Delenda est Carthago, “Carthage must be destroyed”. In 146BC it was; not one stone was left atop another.
The emperor Augustus built it up again, and it is the vestiges of this Roman Carthage that we see today. But it, too, was largely destroyed by the Vandals and later by the Arabs, so the surviving monuments consist of half a dozen widely spaced sites, “lurking”, as one guidebook puts it, “among the plush villas of Tunis’s wealthier commuters”.
A good way to make the tour is by means of a jolly little train called the TGM; get off at Carthage Amilcar or Carthage Salammbo. You could begin with a visit to the excellent Carthage Museum, and then move on to see the Antonine Baths, once the largest in the Roman world: the central pool alone was of Olympic proportions.
One goes to Carthage, however, primarily to say that one has been to Carthage. It could never qualify as one of the great classical sites; it is too diffuse, too patchy. See it – and then progress to further glories in Tunis and beyond.
A few kilometres north of Carthage is Sidi Bou Saïd, an enchanting village just 40 minutes’ drive from Tunis, making it a good base for visiting the capital. It is a higgledy-piggledy collection of snow-white cubical houses climbing up a steep hillside of bougainvillea and geranium. In the 1920s and 1930s the town was a bit of an intellectual hub: it was impossible, legend has it, to walk down the main street without bumping into Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide or the Sitwells. The hotel to plump for is the Dar Saïd (www.darsaid.com.tn), a traditional old villa built round a series of small courtyards with a lovely garden and delightful staff.
The first thing to do in Tunis is to plunge into the labyrinth of the medina. Don’t bother about maps; get lost and drink in the atmosphere. Sooner or later you will reach the great Zitouna mosque. They won’t let you beyond the courtyard; but its silence and space, after the noise and chaos of the souk, will be welcome.
Tucked away in a western suburb, occupying a former royal palace, is the Bardo Museum, one of the great museums of the world. It owes its splendour to the fact that the rich Romans who built their country villas in the first and second centuries had a passion for floor mosaics; even in their smaller and less important rooms, they could hardly bear to leave a square inch uncovered. The Bardo has by far the largest collection of these mosaics anywhere. They are not only abstract designs; all Roman life is here. Hunting and fishing, harvesting and winemaking were popular subjects, as were mythology and religion, with a good deal of drunkenness on the part of Bacchus, Silenus and occasionally Hercules. There are magnificent, weed-covered Neptunes and bosomy Venuses, and a superb depiction of Ulysses tied to his mast, while the sirens do their worst stage left and his sailors – their ears stopped with wax – stare with wonderfully vacant expressions.
So much richness and colour makes one long to visit the sites themselves. Of our five days in Tunisia, two were devoted to day-long expeditions. The first took us west to Dougga and Bulla Regia in the west. At Dougga, I felt, I could happily have lived. It is set on a sloping hillside, looking out over olive groves and broad fields, with more wooded hills rising up behind. There is an enormous theatre seating 3,500 – the Comédie françaisemakes appearances in summer – and a vast temple known as the Capitol, astonishingly well preserved and surely the most beautiful single Roman monument in all north Africa.
Tunisia can get hot – it was 40°C during our visit – and at Bulla Regia, our next port of call, they had a unique way of dealing with it. Alone in the Roman empire, they built their villas underground. Three of four of these have been excavated; they have a regular ground floor, with dining rooms and bedrooms sunk below it. The difference in temperature between the two levels was dramatic. One of the villas, known as the House of Amphitrite, has a superb mosaic of Venus, so well protected that the Bardo has very properly left it in situ.
Our second expedition took us south. Its principal objective was the curious-sounding Thuburbo Majus. It is a Berber name, and indeed was a Berber-Carthaginian settlement long before the Romans arrived at about the time of Christ. This prosperous city was abandoned soon after the Arab occupation and was only rediscovered towards the end of the 19th century. There was a splendid forum, three of its sides colonnaded, while the Capitol Temple – under the joint protection of Jupiter, Juno and Minerva – occupied the fourth. Here stood a gigantic statue of Jupiter; judging by the head and one of the feet, now in the Bardo, it must have stood some seven and a half metres high. Thuburbo, it is plain, was no Hicksville.
The return journey to Tunis took us along the line of the second-century Roman aqueduct that carried water from Zaghouan to Carthage; a surprising length of it still survives. And then, up in the hills a kilometre or two behind it, there is Oudhna, Uthina to the Romans. The ambition of Roman building in these relatively remote regions is staggering. The site boasts an amphitheatre which is the third largest in Africa; it held about 16,000.
High on the hilltop stands what remains of the Capitol, its six broken columns of creamy marble still soaring proud against the sky. Uthina seems to have been particularly well endowed with floor mosaics; the originals are in the Bardo but the best have been replaced on site by meticulous copies.
Those two excursions were all we had time for; but they gave us some idea of what this magical country has to offer. Carthaginians, Numidians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Ottomans and, finally, the French, Tunisia has known them all – and remembers them.
John Julius Norwich’s most recent book is ‘Trying to Please’ (Dovecote Press, £20)
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An oasis amid the oases
There can be few places to stay in Tunisia more beautiful than the isolated Tamerza Palace Hotel, in the heart of what are called the Jerid oases, writes Sandra Boler. The landscape here is some of the most spectacular in the country, the great barren cliffs of golden stone turning to ochre and pink with the passage of the sun. The arid land is dotted with these rocky desert oases built around waterfalls and local springs. Tamerza is one of the most picturesque, quiet compared with the popular Tozeur to the south, just nudging the border with Algeria and a perfect place to rest before setting off to the deep south and the Sahara desert.
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| The Tamerza Palace |
All the rooms look out over the village and on the first night young boys lit 5,000 tiny candles in the ruins for a group of visiting dignitaries.
There is no attempt to go overboard on the Berber theme and of the three types of room, classic, traditional and contemporary, the latter worked best. Our bed was covered with a fine wool herringbone throw; the floors of soft stone tiles in pinkish grey and brown were banded in pale grey marble, colours of the earth. Huge windows looked out over the village and we sat on our balcony and watched the candles flicker into the silent night.
The hotel hammam or bainsberbères were wonderful. An infinity pool looked out over the oasis, water trickled over the strange roses des sables stones as soft clouds of steam filled the hammam room. Treatments included the Touareg massage with hot sand bags instead of hot stones. Relaxing in a djellaba and Tunisian towelling fouta in this extraordinary place miles from anywhere was a complete joy.
www.tamerza-palace.com; tel: +216 71 951 625 or +216 71 951 637. From TD255 to TD1,700 (£120-£799 per night)
