Rome, Sand & the Maghreb

The Medina of Tunis is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a trading city since the ninth century — a tight grid of covered souks where perfumers, cloth merchants, leather workers, and spice sellers occupy distinct streets in an arrangement unchanged since the Ottoman period. The Bardo Museum holds the largest collection of Roman mosaics in the world, room after room of intact floors lifted from villas across the North African provinces.

Twenty minutes north of Tunis, Carthage sits beside the Mediterranean — founded by Phoenician settlers in the ninth century BC, razed by Rome in 146 BC, and rebuilt as a Roman city on the same site. The Antonine Baths give the most legible sense of the scale. Sidi Bou Said, a hilltop village of blue-painted doors and white walls overlooking the bay, is fifteen minutes away and as photographed as it is genuinely beautiful.

The drive inland takes us to Dougga — routinely cited as the best-preserved Roman city in North Africa. Set on a hillside above the Oued Khalled valley, the site is virtually intact: the Capitol temple, the theatre, the triumphal arch, the forum, and the Libyco-Punic mausoleum — accessible on foot, virtually unguarded, almost entirely crowd-free. The afternoon continues to Kairouan, one of the holiest cities in Islam; its Great Mosque, founded in 670 AD, is the oldest in the Maghreb.

El Jem is a market town of 20,000 in the middle of the Tunisian steppe, and it contains the third-largest Roman amphitheatre ever built — seating 35,000, constructed in the third century AD to serve the region's prosperous olive oil trade. The theatre is intact to the upper gallery on most sides. In the afternoon we drive south into the olive and almond country of the pre-desert, toward the edge of the Sahara.

Tozeur is the gateway to the Saharan west: a palm oasis of 40,000 built on a spring that keeps two million date palms alive in otherwise extreme desert, its medina's ochre geometric brickwork unlike anything else in Tunisia. Beyond the oasis, the Chott el-Jerid is a vast seasonal salt lake — 5,000 square kilometres — that shimmers with persistent mirages in the dry months. Beyond it, the Ong Jemel rock formation, a Star Wars filming location, sits among the dunes.

Matmata is the village of the underground houses — troglodytic dwellings dug vertically into the soft rock, their courtyards open to the sky, occupied for generations as defence against summer heat reaching 45°C. Hotel Sidi Driss, the most famous, served as Luke Skywalker's childhood home in the original Star Wars. From Matmata, a drive to the coast and the causeway crossing to Djerba.

Djerba is a flat, sun-bleached island off the southern coast, reached by a Roman-built causeway in use for two thousand years — the right place to close the land journey: whitewashed villages, a slow pace, a long beach. The El Ghriba synagogue, one of the oldest functioning synagogues in the world, is the centrepiece of an island that has maintained a small Jewish community continuously for more than two millennia. The souk in Houmt Souk sells the textiles and ceramics the island has produced since antiquity.

A morning flight from Djerba back to Tunis-Carthage for onward international connections, or a final night in Tunis for late departures. Those continuing to Algeria connect by a short flight to Algiers.

The Casbah of Algiers climbs a steep hillside above the bay in a density of whitewashed walls, Ottoman palaces, and narrow stepped lanes. Built primarily in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was the setting for Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers. The Dar Mustapha Pacha, an eighteenth-century palace with a carved-plaster interior of exceptional quality, and the Palais des Raïs, three restored Ottoman palaces, are the architectural centrepieces.

The Roman ruins of Tipaza sit directly on the Mediterranean cliff edge west of Algiers: columns, basilicas, and mausolea growing from the coastal scrub, the sea visible through the ruins in every direction. Albert Camus, who grew up nearby, wrote about its melancholy in Nuptials with a precision the place still validates. The Mausoleum of Mauretania — a 30-metre circular tomb from the first century BC — stands a short drive inland, massive and almost entirely unvisited.

The road east from Algiers passes through the Kabyle region — the Berber heartland — to Djemila, a Roman city set in a narrow mountain valley near Sétif whose position required the grid plan to bend around the topography. The result is one of the most visually satisfying Roman sites in North Africa: a triumphal arch, a theatre, a Severan forum complex, and a museum housing the finest Roman mosaics in Algeria. Continue east to Constantine.

Constantine is not a standard stop on any itinerary, which is precisely why it should be. The old city occupies a limestone plateau cut off on three sides by a deep gorge — the Rhumel river runs 200 metres below — connected by bridges that span the centuries: the Roman Bab el-Kantara, the Ottoman-era Sidi Rached viaduct (27 arches), and the Sidi M'Cid suspension bridge, one of the longest in the world at its 1912 construction. The view from the Sidi M'Cid bridge is the definitive image of Algeria.

Timgad — the Roman Thamugadi — was founded as a military colony by the Emperor Trajan in 100 AD on the high Aurès plateau and has been sitting there, largely intact, ever since. The street grid is as legible as the day it was laid out: the decumanus and cardo maximus, the forum, the library (one of the best-preserved in the Roman world), the Trajan Arch, and a 3,500-seat theatre. It is the best-preserved example of Roman urban planning outside Italy, standing on a semi-arid plateau at 1,000 metres, essentially deserted on most days.

A final day in the northeast before returning toward the capital. The Sétif archaeological museum holds a substantial collection of mosaics and bronzes from the sites of the region. Sétif is also the site of the May 1945 massacre — the suppression of Algerian independence demonstrations on VE Day — an unavoidable context for any serious engagement with modern Algeria, and one we address directly rather than skirt.

A day in Algiers at your own pace. The city repays slow attention: the Martyrs' Memorial on the hill above the port, the Museum of Fine Arts on the Trocadéro esplanade, the hammams of the lower Casbah, the fish restaurants along the corniche where the evening catch comes directly from the boats below. Or a day trip to Blida and the orange groves of the Mitidja plain, or a connection to Tlemcen — the Pearl of the West, a medieval Islamic city of Almoravid mosques near the Moroccan border.

Transfer to Houari Boumediene International Airport for onward connections.