Tunisia

Tunisia holds more Roman North Africa than any country in the atlas, and holds it in usable condition: the amphitheatre at El Djem seated some thirty-five thousand and still stands to its upper tier. Carthage supplies the rarer thing — a site whose importance is what was destroyed rather than what survives. Against the ruins sit a walled Islamic capital, one of Sunni Islam's four historic centres of learning, and a blue-and-white village that taught the Mediterranean a colour scheme.