The National Museum of Le Bardo

With probably the world's best display of mosaic and certainly North Africa's best Roman collection, the National Museum of Le Bardo is well worth the short sortie from Tunis.

The suburb of Le Bardo sprawls around its palace. The Hafsites first built here but little remains of the vast beylical complex that subsequently grew. In the 1860s the travel writer Hesse-Wartegg found it 'a town of marble palaces... partly in the Renaissance, partly in the Oriental style'... with 'a line Eastern bazaar for the inhabitants... whose number amounts to two thousand'... and with sentries who 'crouch on the ground, knitting in hand'. Self-contained with barracks, mosques andeven its own judge, Le Bardo saw the signing in 1881 of the treaty establishing the French protectorate, and remained the beys' main residence until 1957. The present palace, built in 1882, now houses the National Museum and, until recently, Parliament. Stone lions line the staircase of the less imposing Majlis en-Nuwwab (the now-relocated Chamber of Deputies) to the left of the entrance portico of pink columns and white arches.

Stripped of its stele and sarcophagi, (the now-empty entrance hall culminates in a bookshop and cafe. To the right, the Punic Rooms start with walls and ceiling covered in prehistory display-panels. The hermaïon here, from 40,000 BC and considered 'the world's first known monument of religious inspiration', is a pile of flints, bones and chipped pebbles from El-Guettar. There follow stele and earthenware from the tophets of Carthage and Sousse (8th-2nd century BC); terra-cotta figurines, toiletry trinkets, beads and seals in precious stone or bone, many of obviously Egyptian origin; bronzes, a beautiful alabaster urn, an ostrich's egg and oil-lamps (old men's heads with beards for wicks). A showcase at the end contains terracotta masks, grinning, leering, ferocious or twisted.

31 The most popular room in the Bardo Museum, showing the famous mosaic

of Ulysses and the Sirens

Left of the entrance hall, the Christian Room's font, tomb covers and mosaics have less sophistication but more impact: Daniel in the lions' den, builders at work and the Christian hall-marks of doves, grapes, labarum-signs and Dog Latin. Off this is the Bulla Regia Room: massive, exquisite statues of gods and emperors it must have been a joy to unearth (one Captain Benet had the privilege in 1906) and a 2nd-century AD mosaic of Perseus and Andromeda partly defaced but superb by any standard. The final room displays ten remarkably lifelike emperors' heads.

The broad staircase up from the Christian Room is flanked by mosaics, many from Tabarka. To the left of the Apollo at the top, the sight is suddenly beautiful after the business-like ground floor. The upper patio of the palace - grilled windows, colonnades, galleries, pendant arches and a ceiling almost Baroque in pink, green and gilt - has a magnificent array of antiquity. The inner area of mosaics is bordered by thirteen fine Roman statues. In the cases and corners around are smaller busts ( the first century AD Utica woman with an Afro - historians date statues by their knowledge of Roman coiffures - and Lucius Verus realistic even to his eyeballs).

The ceiling of the Sousse Room, the former banqueting hall, splendidly complements its 'documentary' mosaics of Roman farm buildings and country-life scenes (plus the head and feet of a gigantic Jupiter, from Thuburbo Maius). Smaller rooms beyond display, between superb mosaics and painted-wood ceilings, a scale model of Dougga, hunting scenes from El-Jem and 3rd-century wrestlers from Gigthis, all detailed in fine tesserae. The next chamber is usually thronged thanks to the much-reproduced mosaic of Ulysses resisting the Sirens.

Across the patio lies the former Music Room, with galleries and painted-wood ceiling again delightful but mosaics perhaps less impressive. The dais at the head of the patio gives onto a perfect Tunisian chamber of tiled walls and sculpted plaster cupolas, in which stands the famous 3rd-century mosaic of Virgil and the muses Clio and Melpomene (from Sousse).

A vestibule of Punic jewellery leads back to the patio and the Mahdia Rooms. In or about 81 BC a galley-load of Grecian treasures sank in a storm three miles off Mahdia. The wooden ship rotted but its bronze and stone cargo, hall buried in the sea-bed, was spotted by a sponge-diver in 1907. It took until 1913 to raise this unique treasure trove: in metal, from 1500-lb anchors to bronze bed fittings and dwarf and hermaphrodite miniatures; in stone, from barnacle pock-marked capitals to still-shapely urns. Busts of Eros (I25 BC), and of a bearded Dionysus are the masterpieces of the collection, which since 2000 is displayed in sidelit cases like dioramas and called 'The Ship Hall', 'The Medallions Hall' etc.

Adjacent to these submarine relics are a patio of ancient Greek cratera-bowls draped with phoney foliage, and halls of massive mosaics, many with marine scenes, from Utica, Carthage and Rades. The Oudna Room, the dining-room of the palace, has a fine painted ceiling, plus Orpheus, Bacchus and a mosaic menagerie of elephants, bears, lions and other animals long since confined to sub-Saharan Africa.

Stairs to the next floor climb between walls tapestried with mosaics. Here room after room is floored and walled with mosaics depicting contemporary beasts and beliefs, and graphically - often heroically -recording Roman tastes, activities and life-styles. Beneath the gilded arches of the patio's upper gallery the display-cases are too frequently changed to be described.

Beyond the Apollo at the head at the first stairs, the Arab Museum occupies a small beylical palace older (1831) than the main building which it adjoins. The premises are as tasteful as the contents: beneath sculpted cupolas, unusually inlaid with colour and offset by the paler pastel wall-tiles, are collections of illuminated Qorans, copperware, costumes and regional jewellery, and an end-room rather bleak with glassware, ceramics and inscriptions. Across the courtyard with its spiral fluted columns, the T-shaped chamber is a traditional qbu, reception-room.

From the ground-floor entrance hall, the Punic and Christian rooms, the last lap is along the Corridor of Stele and Sarcophagi. These, funerary statues in marble and the roped off mosaic of two podgy, naked boxers (from Thuburbo Maius) are some compensation for the sculpted couple cuddling on a stele and now prudishly removed. The final Thuburbo Maius Room is currently closed; so frequently is the adjacent Islamic exhibition of principally ceramic plaques and pottery.

TASKS