THE CITY THAT ROME SALTED AND THEN REBUILT
Carthage was founded by Phoenician settlers from Tyre in the 9th century BC and grew into the dominant maritime power of the western Mediterranean, fighting Rome to a standstill across three Punic Wars before finally losing in 146 BC. Roman legions razed the city so thoroughly that later writers claimed the ground was sown with salt — a detail modern historians doubt actually happened, but one that captures how completely Carthage was meant to disappear. It didn't stay gone: a century later Julius Caesar and then Augustus rebuilt Carthage as a Roman colony, and it grew into the second-largest city in the western empire, the amphitheater and baths visited on this itinerary among its later monuments.
A MOSQUE OLDER THAN THE CITY AROUND IT
Tunis itself grew up around the Zitouna Mosque, founded at the turn of the 8th century using columns physically salvaged from the ruins of Carthage — a literal transfer of the old capital's stone into the new one. The mosque became the seat of one of the Islamic world's oldest universities, and for over a thousand years scholars trained there in law, theology, and grammar before the medina that surrounds it had grown into much more than a scattering of streets radiating from its gates. The medina's souks organized themselves by trade around that same core — spice merchants near the mosque, then perfumers, then metalworkers further out — a layout that still roughly holds today.
A FRENCH CITY GRAFTED ONTO AN ARAB ONE
When France made Tunisia a protectorate in 1881, French administrators built their new city immediately outside the medina walls rather than inside them, laying Avenue Jules Ferry — renamed Avenue Habib Bourguiba after independence — as a wide, tree-lined boulevard modeled on Paris. The result is a city with an unusually sharp seam: pass through Bab El Bhar, the old sea gate, and the medina's covered, curving lanes give way within a few steps to a colonial-era grid of Art Nouveau facades and pavement cafés. Neither side was built to accommodate the other, which is why the join still reads so clearly more than a century later.
THE PAINTER WHO REPAINTED A VILLAGE
Sidi Bou Said's blue-and-white look is not ancient — it was largely codified in 1915, when Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, a French-Tunisian composer and painter, settled in the village and, by some accounts, lobbied local authorities to mandate the whitewash-and-blue-shutter scheme across the whole hillside to preserve what he saw as its Andalusian character. His own palace, Ennejma Ezzahra, became a magnet for visiting artists and musicians through the early 20th century, and the village's reputation as a bohemian retreat — painters, novelists, and later Paul Klee among the visitors who passed through — dates from exactly that period, not from any older tradition.
ONE ARENA, TWO EMPIRES OF SCALE
The Amphitheatre of El Jem, a day trip south by train from Tunis, was built in the early 3rd century AD in what was then Thysdrus, a city that grew wealthy on olive oil exports and needed an arena to match its ambitions rather than its actual population. At 35,000 seats it rivaled the Colosseum in scale despite Thysdrus never approaching Rome's size, and its unusually complete state today — the underground passages where animals and gladiators waited are still walkable — is largely an accident of neglect: the site was never built over, because the town around it shrank rather than grew after Rome's decline.