Why take a trip to Tripolitania?

Extraordinary archaeology

Tripolitania has been one of the most important regions of Libya since ancient times: its name derives from tripolis , or the three cities of Punic/Roman origin, Sabratha, Oea (Tripoli) and Leptis Magna. The two archaeological sites of Sabratha and Leptis Magna are only the most extensive and important, but several others are worth a visit, including Zanzour with its late Roman necropolis and Villa Silin, a practically intact 3rd century AD residence.

Leptis Magna

R. Bianchi Bandinelli wrote in 1964: "Leptis Magna is today a large field of ruins that emerge at times and in groups among the sand dunes and low vegetation on the seashore in northern Africa, on the coast of Tripolitania".

The romantic description no longer equates to what the visitor finds on the site today, but the charm of Leptis has not changed: the site is not yet attacked by myriads of tourists looking for yet another place to mention in the living rooms of rich homes and on Its paved streets, among the silent ruins wander the most demanding travelers who find, within the Roman city, the exquisite pleasure of admiring the monuments in an absolute silence broken by the sound of their own steps. The site is immense and the small numbers of cultural tourism here spread from one part of the city to the other, giving everyone the opportunity to feel a bit like an explorer and discover themselves as a bit of an archaeologist, at least with their imagination!

Anyone who travels along the road that leads from Tripoli to Benghazi, the old Via Balbia, 110 km after Tripoli, will find himself near a recent urban agglomeration of little tourist interest: Homs. The name does not reveal in any way, in any assonance, the presence of one of the largest and most famous cities in the Roman world: Leptis Magna.

These ruins, witnesses of more than a millennium of history, are considered, due to their beauty and their extraordinary state of conservation, among the most beautiful and interesting ones in Roman Africa and in the entire Mediterranean basin.

Sabratha

Sabratha despite the period of maximum splendor due to the rich trade of oil, schavi, ivory, gold and animals for the circus, evidenced by the statio sabratensium , the representative office of Sabratha traders in Ostia, the port of Rome), did not reach never the grandeur of Leptis.

Despite this it still lives today in the pages of the famous Latin poet Apuleius, who lived and set his Apology here.

Of the three cities, born as Phoenician emporiums and then developed under the yoke of Rome, Tripoli, or rather Oea, is the one that preserves only one Roman monument: it is the arch of Marcus Aurelius, a quadrifonte arch which must have been at the crossroads of the two most important streets of the city: the cardo and the decumanus. The medina, that is, the Arab city, and later the Italian one, was built on the remaining ancient city.