Bardo National Museum

Listen to your footsteps for a moment. Below the soft tap of your shoes, the floor is made of thousands of tiny stone cubes, each one smaller than a fingernail. They are cream, ochre, rust red, slate grey and sea green. Someone set each cube by hand, almost two thousand years ago. In most museums, art hangs on the walls. Here, much of it lies at your feet, and climbs the walls around you.

You are standing in the Bardo National Museum, on the western edge of Tunis. It holds one of the largest collections of Roman mosaics anywhere in the world. Before it held mosaics, though, this building held a court. The Bardo was a palace of the beys of Tunis, the hereditary rulers who governed this land under loose Ottoman authority from the early eighteenth century onward. The name Bardo itself was given to this whole district, long before any museum existed.

The museum opened in 1888, during the French protectorate. At first it carried another name, the Alaoui Museum, in honour of the ruling bey of that time. After Tunisia won independence in 1956, the collection became the Bardo National Museum. Here is a detail many visitors miss. The palace complex is still shared with a working institution. Tunisia's parliament sits next door, in another part of the same old princely grounds. Art and politics have been neighbours here for generations.

Look up as you move through the older rooms. The ceilings are carved and painted wood, or plaster cut into honeycomb patterns. The walls are covered with glazed tiles in blue, green and yellow. These rooms were built to impress guests of the bey. Now they frame objects that are far older than the palace itself. The contrast is part of the experience. A Roman floor from a farming estate lies beneath a ceiling made for a nineteenth-century prince.

Why are there so many mosaics in this part of the world? In Roman times, North Africa was rich. The province around Carthage grew huge amounts of grain and olive oil for the empire. Wealthy landowners built large villas, and they wanted floors that showed their status. Workshops here developed a bold, colourful style of their own. Many of the floors you see were lifted from excavated houses, baths and churches across Tunisia. They were cut into sections and brought here to be protected.

Now find the portrait of the poet Virgil. It is one of the most treasured pieces in the museum. It was discovered in Sousse, a coastal city once called Hadrumetum. Virgil sits in a white toga, holding a scroll. Two Muses stand on either side of him, the goddesses of history and of tragedy. The scroll carries a line from his great poem, the Aeneid. Many scholars consider it one of the oldest surviving images of the poet. Stand close, and you can see how the shading on his face is built from tiny shifts of colour.

The sea runs through this collection again and again. You will see Neptune, the Roman god of the sea, riding in triumph across vast floors. Around him swim fish, octopus, dolphins and sea creatures with curling tails. Look for the scene of Ulysses tied to the mast of his ship. In the old Greek tale, he asked his sailors to bind him so he could hear the Sirens singing without steering onto the rocks. This version came from Dougga, a Roman town in the hills of northern Tunisia.

The mosaics also show everyday life, and this is where they become personal. You will find hunting scenes with horses and dogs. You will see farm estates, with workers, animals and the walls of a country house. Some floors show the games of the amphitheatre, with wild animals and fighters. Others show feasts, fishing boats and harvests. Together, they are like photographs from a world without cameras. They tell you what wealthy Romans in Africa admired, and what they wanted their guests to see.

Here is the second surprise. One whole section holds treasure from the bottom of the sea. In 1907, sponge divers working off the town of Mahdia found the wreck of an ancient ship. It had sunk around the first century before Christ, carrying a cargo of Greek art. Divers brought up bronze statues, marble columns and decorated furniture. Some of the bronzes still show the marks of long years underwater. They were likely headed for the villas of rich Romans in Italy. They never arrived.

The Bardo is not only Roman. The collection moves through many layers of this land's past. There are objects from prehistoric Tunisia and from Carthage, the great Punic city, founded by settlers from the eastern Mediterranean. Punic means connected to Carthage and its people. You will also find early Christian floors, with baptismal fonts and tomb mosaics. And there are rooms for the Islamic period, with ceramics, manuscripts and fine metalwork. Walking through, you cross more than two thousand years in a few hundred steps.

The museum also carries a painful memory. In March 2015, gunmen attacked the Bardo. More than twenty people were killed, most of them visitors from abroad. The museum reopened soon afterwards, and a memorial now honours those who died. Many Tunisians saw the reopening as a statement. Their heritage, and their welcome to travellers, would not be closed down by violence. If you come across the memorial, it is worth pausing there for a quiet moment.

As you walk, notice how the building has grown. A modern extension was added in the early twenty-first century, with clean white walls and wide, open galleries. It gives the largest mosaics room to breathe. You can step back and see a whole floor at once, the way a Roman host might have seen it from a doorway. Then you can step closer and see the single cubes. Both views matter. From far away you see the story. Up close you see the labour.

Before you leave, take one more look at the floor under your feet. Think of the workshop that made it. Someone cut the stones, sorted the colours, and pressed each piece into wet mortar, one by one. Their names are mostly lost. Their work is still here. When you step back outside into the light of Tunis, you may notice the same colours around you. Ochre walls, blue doors, olive trees, the pale stone of the streets. The mosaics did not invent those colours. They borrowed them from this land.