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Le Bardo is a district west of the centre built around a former royal palace that now holds the Bardo National Museum — home to what is widely called the finest collection of Roman mosaics in the world. This is a museum district of the very first rank: the national collection displayed in a bey's palace, one of the essential experiences of the Mediterranean. The register is grand and world-class. The mosaics alone are worth the journey.
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No published museums in this district yet.
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Aladdin has no Arabic manuscript older than its French translation. Behind the gap stands a young man from Aleppo, catalogued for a century as anonymous.
The most famous "Arabian" tale in the world is missing from the oldest Arabic manuscript of the Thousand and One Nights — because before a French translator wrote it down in Paris, there was no manuscript of it to be missing from.
How the pomegranate became one of the most confidently named motifs in Islamic ornament — and one of the least confidently identified — across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, with meanings we mostly attached later.
A slab of sixth-century plaster in the Met shows a fruit you recognise at a glance: a pomegranate, and surely it means paradise. Hold that certainty up to the light and it dissolves. Across a thousand years of tile, silk and stucco, the pomegranate is the shape we name most confidently and identify least — blurring into the artichoke and the palmette, its meanings attached by later viewers, its very name partly a nineteenth-century invention
How one of North Africa's oldest writing traditions survived conquest, colonial classification and the loss of its readers — and why, for much of it, we still cannot say what the marks mean.
A flat rock in southern Morocco is covered in a script you can see is writing and still cannot read a word of. It belongs to the Amazigh — a visual language older in North Africa than the Arabic alphabet, carried onto skin and wool and silver, nearly erased, and now reassembled into an alphabet on ministry walls. This is the story of what survived, what didn't, and why almost everything we "know" these signs mean was added later.
A courtyard plan far older than Islam turned North African houses — and the medinas built from them — to face inward. Climate and religion only half-explain why, and what finally displaced the courtyard says the rest.
The blank walls and inward courtyards of Fez, Tunis, Algiers and Cairo are usually explained by heat or religion. Both are true; neither is the whole story. The clue is in what eventually pushed the courtyard out of the modern city.
How the women of Sejnane and the Sadu tents made a world of geometric art the museum system had no shelf for — and how it is finally being called by its name.
Two women's traditions — the clay of Sejnane in Tunisia, the woven tents of the Arabian Peninsula — share no bloodline, only a rhyme: the same spare geometry, held and passed down by women, in whatever material their world gave them. This is the story of the visual knowledge the West filed under "craft," the makers it kept downstairs, and the contemporary artists now carrying it back up into the room where "art" is defined.
The letter set loose, the line woven, the arabesque the West once threw away — and the women who built modern abstraction out of all three, then got written out of it.
Abstraction is usually told as a Western invention that arrived elsewhere late. Saloua Raouda Choucair, Etel Adnan, Madiha Umar and a room of others tell it differently — often as the only woman in the movement, building modern form from the geometry, craft and calligraphy their own culture already held.
