Message #83830

[Bianca]

From here were shipped slaves, ivory, gems, wild animals and olive oil. This was tough, industrial architecture with none of the showy finesse of the city. The stone rings, where the ships tied up, are as big as skips. "This is one of the sites that excite me, I confess," said Bill wistfully when it was time to leave.

The port was a gift of Septimius Severus. Born in Leptis in 145AD, he was the local boy who made so good he became emperor, the only African who did. (He died, incidentally, in York.) Leptis, already rich from olive oil, profited mightily from his patronage, a relationship celebrated in the triumphal arch.

The arch survives, virtually intact; its ingratiating marble frieze is in the National Museum. Like other monumental buildings it owes its condition first to the desert and much later to the Italians. Destroyed by earthquakes, Leptis was buried by encroaching sand and then in the 1920s, excavated and meticulously restored by the Italians during their colonisation of Libya.

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The restoration was not entirely altruistic. Mussolini, Italy's Fascist dictator, was more than happy for the world to be reminded of his country's old penchant for imperialism. In 1936 Leptis provided him with a suitably grandiose dais from which to make a speech: you can still see the fence erected to stop him falling off the top of the nymphaeum. "Archaeology as politics," sniffed Prof Manning.

Whatever the motive, the restoration left Leptis, and other Libyan sites such as Sabratha, as much more than mere ruins. This is the spoor of real people in the real places where they lived; where they traded, gossiped, politicked, went to the theatre and the lavatory – there are great examples of both – watched chariots race and gladiators fight, where they whinged, giggled and grieved. Imagination races down paved and colonnaded streets, through amphitheatres, baths and basilicas, headily rummaging among their statues, inscriptions and mosaics for momentary citizenship of ancient Rome.

In Leptis we were lucky. Past the great 8,000-seat theatre, outside the city gates, we came to the coast and a low ridge of sand dunes. There, huddled at the back of the beach, was what looked like a couple of concrete Nissen huts with two igloo-shaped shelters wedged between them.

Bill pushed at an unlocked metal door and we entered the exclusive realms of a gentlemen's bathhouse, in its day a sort of Boodle's with steam rooms. The Leptis Hunting Baths' day was the late 2nd or early 3rd century. They get their name from vivid frescoes of wild animals – leopards and lions – being stuck with spears by curly-haired chaps on safari wearing what appear to be stab jackets and Y-fronts. "These are the only baths in the Roman world preserved pretty much as they were and extremely important in the history of Roman architecture," Bill enthused. "The Pantheon [in Rome] is the only other place you can stand with a Roman dome overhead."

Leptis and Sabratha are in Tripolitania. The second half of the trip took us east to Cyrenaica, the only part of North Africa to be settled by the Greeks. At Tocra, a "mongrel" site, according to Bill, the Byzantines built Christian churches from Roman masonry engraved in Greek.

We had flown to Benghazi, a city that seemed brighter and livelier than sombre Tripoli. My hotel room had not been swept and there were no hangers in the wardrobe; others were without towels or soap. Tourism in Libya is still a bit of a novelty and not without its complications. Besides a visa, you need to have your passport information translated into Arabic. Individual travel is not encouraged: it is much simpler to go in a group. We were accompanied by a delightful minder, a "tourist policeman" whose main, valuable, role seemed to be to bag us the best parking places.

Credit cards are all but useless, but mobile phones work; food is fresh, if repetitive. In the understatement of our tour operator: "Generally, meals are not the high point of the tour." There is an absolute ban on alcohol. Offset against all of that is the charm and humour of the Libyans. One senses they recognise that life in the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya demands a sense of the ridiculous.

Our days were intense. We would be on the road by 8am or 9am, have a lecture from Bill in the coach, spend anything up to four hours at each site and some days not be back until 6.30pm. There were few people around; we had some ruins to ourselves. Nor was there much management, no ropes or barriers to stop you clambering where you wanted. With more visitors such freedom would be seen as neglect.

We were in the Jebel al-Akhdar – the Green Mountains. They are stony hills spattered with dark green scrub, pine and olive trees. On our final day we picnicked in Cyrene, the biggest and most important of the Greek cities. We sat in the sunshine at the Temple of Zeus, a temple larger than the Parthenon, munching sandwiches beneath burly columns raised in the 6th century BC to the king of the Gods. This was Libya at its most imposing.



Telegraph.co.uk