Libya Things to Do Tips by TheWanderingCamel

Tripoli is the only city in Libya to have been continually inhabited since the time of its first foundation in something like 500BC.

The city's mediaeval medina now covers most of the city, known as Oea, built by the Phoenicians and subsequently rebuilt by the Romans. No trace of the Phoenician city remains but a walk through the medina reveals evidence of its Roman heyday. The most apparent and grandest is the Aurelean Arch but keep an eye out as you walk through the twisting lanes of the medina and you will see pillars like the one here, set into the corners and walls of the mediaeval buildings there.

The Aurelian Arch was built in 162-63 during the reign of Marcus Aurelius and marked the crossing of the city's cardo maximus (the main street running north-south from the harbour) and the decimus ( running east-west). Some of the relief carving on the arch is still in reasonable condition, and there are various pieces of architectural masonry in the garden around the arch.

The arch is floodlit at night when it makes a wonderful backdrop to the very pleasant restaurant on the righthand side of the square.

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Much of Tripoli's charm lies within the walls of its small medina. The narrow alleys, many of them roofed against the burning sun) that twist and turn between the white-walled houses with their elaborate doorways, lead you deep into the heart of old Tripoli. You can walk here at any time of day or night, alone or in company as you like. You won't be pestered or harassed to buy in the busy souqs and in the quieter - and even empty - lanes you will feel quite safe. This is no tourist precinct - as so many old cities are these days - and although the medina has been through a period of neglect and semi-desertion, people still live and work here and there is now the beginnings of a conscious move to restore the medina as a living, working entity, not some quasi-historical showplace.

Entering the medina through the great stone arch at the end of Green Square will bring you first to the a small souvenir souq ( even here you'll be left simply to browse in peace) and then on, past shop after shop selling exquisite beaded and embroidered silks and striped fabrics, suitcases and household goods. The gold shops seem never-ending while the laneway is cluttered with barrows selling everything from embroidered slippers to dishcloths. Past mosques and hammams; coppersmiths hammering out their dishes and pots, and minaret-topping crescents, by hand as they have done for centuries; shops selling handsome men's outfits, braided waitcoats and black felt pillbox hats; old men wrapped toga-like in their white berber blankets; women - mostly in modern hejab but the occasional old lady swathed in the traditional fringed white all-enveloping robe gripped in her teeth; stalls piled high with fruit and vegetables; an carpet-cum-curio shop - Berber blankets and rugs, silver teapots and clay lamps; an Italian church newly reconsecrated to Anglicanism ; a Greek Orthodox school; grand 18th European consulates and a blank white house wall painted with the signs of a beauty parlour - a hairdryer and pots of lotions and potions.
Fascinating.

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Despite Libya's often fierce resistance to the Italian occupation of the first half of the 20th century, the older parts of the city outside the medina still have a faded Italianate air to them - the arcaded streets and squares with cafes under their arches and white-painted buildings with their green shutters could just as easily be snoozing under the sun of a provincial town on the other side of the Med as here. A walk down one of the streets leading off the east side of Green Square will take you into this area of the city and lead you to the Grand Mosque where Islamic crescents have replaced the rooftop crosses that once marked this as the city's Cathedral.
The Church of San Francisco has services in many languages these days, to serve the various Christian communities in the city - Italians, Africans, Koreans - but inside it still looks and feels like an Italian church. Coffee will never replace tea as the drink of choice here - but bread is often Italian-style, pasta is a popular dish and the ubiquitous "LIbyan" soup (offered at every meal) is minestrone given a local twist.

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Like all cities in Muslim countries, Tripoli's skies are pierced by the minarets of numerous mosques. The medina has no less than 38 , some so small and simple it is really only the minaret that tells you there is a mosque there at all. None are very grand but many have fine tile work, lovely doors and the different minarets all add their own touch.

The Ahmed Pasha Karamanli Mosque, very near the main entrance to the medina, is the largest - though not the oldest in the old city. Look out for the tomb markers in the small courtyard near the entrance with their Ottoman-style turban tops . Five beautifully carved wooden doors and wonderful tile work are other lovely details here.

The Gurgi Mosque ( seen through the Aurelian arch) - the last mosque to be built by the country's Ottoman rulers in the 19th century is both gorgeously and gloriously decorated with exquisite Moroccan stone fretwork and beautiful wood carving.

The city's Grand Mosque started life as an Italian-built Roman Catholic Cathedral. The work to convert its outward appearance into something more mosque-like has only recently been completed. You'll find this mosque on Algeria Square in the Italian-era part of the city.

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Leptis Magna - once the greatest Roman city in all North Africa - must feature high on the wishlist of all who have a passion for ruins. Abandonment rather than successive rebuilding on the same site has left the city in a wonderfully intact state and the excellent and sensitive work done by way of restoration makes the city an absolute joy to visit. From the moment you walk towards the great triumphal arch of Septimus Severus - the Roman emperor responsible for much of the grandeur of the city - you know this place really is going to prove to be something special. Nothing about it lets you down. Even on the busiest day ( and a busy day in Leptis is probably something akin to the quietest day for decades in most major European sites unless there's a cruise ship in port) the city is big enough absorb all its visitors and leave plenty of quiet spots for you to imagine yourself back into the world of this beautiful place.

Most tourists visit the city with a guide, in which case they'll probably be suffering from information overload by the end of the day. If, like me, you'd rather leave the tutorials to the classroom, you can easily get all the information you're likely to be able to retain from a decent guide book and your own reading. The great set pieces of any Roman city are there - the baths (Hadrianic), the Forums (the "new" Severan and the "old), the basilica ( Justinian's conversion of the Temple of Dionysius), Nymphaeum, Cardo Maximus, the Senate, market and theatre, temples and arches and the information a guide will give you about each and everyone of them will be exhaustive (and exhausting) but the real joy of Leptis is to walk the streets alone and think yourself back in time to when this was a thriving, bustling, and important, city.

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Address: Leptis Magna is about 125km from Tripoli
Directions: Independent visitors can get there by taxi (about 100LD for the return trip/ waiting time) or your hotel can arrange a car and driver . Guides are available there but are not compulsory, despite what the guide books may say. Allow all day for a visit.

The site at Leptis Magna is huge and a short visit will only give you time to make your way through the "city centre" where, as in any modern city you will find the great public buildings - in the case of Roman cities of antiquity - the baths, Senate, market, temples, theatre and such. Here at Leptis they have been beautifully restored and inspire both admiration and awe both for their grandeur and for the dedication of the teams of archaeologists and their workers who have brought them so vividly to life for us. What makes Leptis so special though is its wealth of other buildings and the survival of so much of the rest of the city. You'll need the time to walk some distance to the harbour and out to where the great lighthouse once stood. To see the ampitheatre and the circus you will really need transport - it's two kilometres around by road!
It's only by making your way to these places though that you begin to appreciate the scale of Leptis Magna - both the spread of the city and its importance.

The early silting of the harbour may have closed it to much Roman shipping but the result of that is that it remains in a fine state of preservation and although only the foundations of the lighthouse remain, it's thought that it once stood almost as high as the great Pharos of Alexandria along the coast in Egypt.

The ampitheatre was built to seat some 16,000 spectators and 25,000 people could cheer the charioteers in the circus - one of the largest in all the Empire. The circus is little more than a depression in the ground nowadays with a scattering of masonry but the ampitheatre is still very impressive as is the huge arch and connecting the passage between the two.

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Not all of Leptis Magna is about splendour and the display of power and might. These Romans knew how a thing or two about grace and intimacy too, as displayed in the small bathhouse known as the Hunting Baths from the exquisite frescoes that adorn the inner walls. Here the scale is much more exclusive - this was a bathhouse for a small group of people to use, nothing like the great public Hadrianic baths. Like the harbour and the ampitheatre, they are situated quite a way from the main site and, as they are often closed, if your time is limited you should check to see whether or not they are open before striking out to find them.
Even if they're closed but you have the time, do make the trek, they are wonderfully intact (the drifting sand that covered them for centuries was a great preserver) and, after the pomp and grandeur of the main site, they are refreshingly simple and satifying to see.

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Don't let your eye simply be filled with the grand - and the grandiose - buildings of Leptis. Take time to really look at the wonderful details, the small things that catch your eye - exquisite carving, sometimes as crisp and as fresh as when it was new, sometimes showing the wear of centuries of wind and sand; marble market stall brackets carved with dolphins - and grasshoppers; measuring devices for fair trade in the market - lengths for cloth and others for volume, ensuring the standards of Rome were upheld; fragments of inscriptions in clear Roman capitals - still one of the most beautiful and elegant scripts of all - or simply scratched into a stone - perhaps with a Christian symbol, a secret sign; thin Roman bricks behind a marble veneer; wonderful swirls of green and cream in a fallen column; a glimpse through an small doorway of arch after arch .... beauty and wit as well as form and function, these are the things that endure, that make the city come alive as a place where people lived and worked, loved and played.

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Why all this splendour in what was an major city but still not of an importance to warrant such grandeur? Leptis Magna was the birthplace of Lucius Septimus Severus, Emperor from 193-211AD, and on his being proclaimed Emperor ( a process that involved being tossed skywards on the shields of his army) and in a period of relative peace, he returned to his birthplace and set about a programme of enhancement designed to turn Leptis into a second Rome. Under his direction the harbour was expanded, the new Forum, with its fabulous Gorgon heads - some 75 of which remain - and the civil basilica (later to be turned into a church by the Christian Emperor, Justinian) were built, the Cardo Maximus was extended and widened and the city began to take on the shape we see now in its ruins.
The jewel in all this building is undoubtedly the great Triumphal Arch that tells the story of Septimus' victories and achievements, his family and his place within the might of Rome. Spanning the entry into the site, it's the first thing you see as you walk down into the city and it sets the scene perfectly for the marvels to come.

The bronze statue of Septimus Severan ( the Grim African) outside the museum is a modern reproduction, the somewhat more weathered original is inside along with a positive treasure trove of artifacts from the ruins.

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Address: Leptis Magna lies 125 km east of Tripoli
Directions: The main site is open 8-6 every day, the museum is closed on Mondays. Seperate entry fees apply and there is a camera charge for the museum.

If Leptis is all imperial grandeur (Septimus Severus came from there and set about leaving his mark on the city with some gusto) Sabratha is the face of a very pleasant colonial existence. The coast is higher here so there are more sea views and the place was much smaller so things are on a more domestic scale. It's more ruinous than Leptis - a massive earthquake in 365AD wrought great damage on th city and being built of sandstone rather than limestone the ruins have weathered more - and gets fewer visitors - we virtually had the place to ourselves on our visit - gorgeous in the late sunshine. Apart from the theatre, which is fenced around, it's a very open site. There's an amazing amount of the original flooring left in lots of the buildings as well as lots of the marble facing on some walls -including the very splendid octagonal latrine at the seaward baths. Life must have been quite idyllic here - for the ruling class at any rate.

There's a glimpse of the Punic city that predates the Romans here at Sabratha in the Mausoleum of Bel that stands out quite clearly as you move through the north-western sector of the site. It may be a reconstruction - the original was dismantled by the Byzantines and the stones used in the city wall - but it is well done and is very striking.

You'll find the usual features of any Roman city here - Cardo Maximus, Forum, Civil Basilica, Senate, various temples, several baths ( the seaward baths are in particularly good condition and their location, overlooking the sea, is splendid), and a magnificent theatre. The ampitheatre, as is usual, lies at some distance from the centre of the city.

Whilst the rest of the city is considerably weathered and you will need a guide if you really want to know the in and outs of it all, again there is much to be said for taking the place as it stands, making use of your own guidebook and the signs that are there and working it out for yourself.

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Address: Sabratha lies about 80km west of Tripoli
Directions: Open 8-6 every day.
Seperate charges for the site, and museums and, as always in Libya, camera charges apply.