Destinations: Kerkouane, Tunisia

Carthago delenda est!” Carthage must be destroyed, Cato the Elder concluded each time he spoke in the Roman senate. And so it was. At the conclusion of the Third Punic War, in 146 B.C., the Romans destroyed Carthage so thoroughly that archaeologists can find few traces of the huge Punic city today. (A few meager remnants of Punic Carthage have been recovered, but most of the city—once the second largest in Africa, after Alexandria—was lost to history forever when Julius Caesar erected a new Roman-African capitol on its site in 46 B.C.).

If you want to walk through the streets of a Punic city, you must go to Kerkouane instead. A sleepy little coastal city about 75 miles from Carthage, on Tunisia’s Cape Bon Peninsula, Kerkouane was founded around 550 B.C. and managed to survive as a Punic city for 300 years. The city was eventually sacked and partially destroyed by the Romans during the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.), but for some unknown reason the Romans never rebuilt or reoccupied Kerkouane. Its remains lay undisturbed, just below the surface of the earth, until they were accidentally discovered by vacationing archaeologists in 1952.