Bardo National Museum

The Bardo National Museum is the reason many travellers come to Tunis, and it deserves a full morning. It opened on 7 May 1888 as the Alaoui Museum, named after the reigning bey, and took its present name after independence. The collections occupy a former beylical palace in the Bardo district west of the centre, a site whose origins go back to a Hafsid palace, and a major extension of around 9,000 square metres was completed in 2012.

The museum holds more than 150,000 objects arranged across roughly fifty rooms and galleries, covering prehistory, the Libyco-Punic period, the Hellenistic world, Rome and Islamic Tunisia. Its fame rests on the Roman mosaics gathered from sites such as Carthage, Sousse, Althiburos and Oudna, many of them laid out on the walls and floors of rooms named after those places. Look for the Virgil Mosaic, which gives its name to one of the rooms, the marble statues of gods and emperors from Carthage and Thuburbo Majus, and the bust of Aphrodite recovered from the Mahdia shipwreck. The Punic galleries include grimacing masks and the stele of the priest and the child, and the Islamic department holds leaves of the Blue Qur'an of Kairouan.

The museum shares its grounds with the parliament building, and it closed when the assembly was suspended in 2021. It reopened in September 2023, and the government's administration portal notes that a larger restructuring of the visitor route is planned, so some rooms may be rearranged when you visit. The same portal gives a 09:30 opening time; check the day before you go, as times can change. The museum is also remembered for the attack of 18 March 2015, in which more than twenty people were killed, and security checks at the entrance are thorough.

Allow at least two to three hours, more if you are interested in mosaics. The palace rooms themselves are part of the visit, so look up and around as well as down at the floors, and do not rush the upper levels. The collection suits anyone with an interest in the ancient Mediterranean, and children often enjoy picking out the figures and creatures in the floors.

The Bardo is about 8 km from the medina, so most visitors arrive by taxi or with a guide. Several hotels and guides combine it with a half day in the medina, which works well because the museum gives context to everything you later see at Carthage and in the old city.