The late Eric Newby, who wrote an indispensable guide to the Mediterranean, declared Carthage to be ‘a let-down’. He was right, especially if arriving after Cyrene and Leptis Magna.
Anyone who's studied Latin - or even not - has likely come across the expression ‘Delenda est Carthago’ (Carthage must be destroyed), which it well and truly was after the final Punic War when the city was burned and the Romans sewed its fields with salt.
Ancient places are sometimes romanticized as far from present-day habitation.
'Nothing besides remains; the lone and level sands stretch far away.'
(Ozymandias - Shelley)
But, of course, they're often not - Rome's forum and the Acropolis in Athens are prime examples. Carthage is in an upscale neighbourhood and current residents can look out on where human sacrifices took place a couple of millennia ago.
Here are a Carthage 2010 street and house.
Tunisia suffers - as have so many Middle Eastern countries - from a sclerotic president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who's hung on since the year dot. The previous one was deposed on the grounds of senility. The current leader's pictures (of which I saw more - and bigger - than Gaddafi in Libya) show a much younger and more vigorous man than his current 74 years.
The liveliest thing about Carthage was this group of schoolchildren.
Of more interest than the ruins - to me, anyway - was the village of Sidi Bou Said on a hillside overlooking the Mediterranean.
What the tourist brochures don’t say is that, in 1988, an Israeli hit squad killed a senior PLO leader, Abu Jihad, who was living here. Two bodyguards and a Tunisian were also killed.
