You are met at Mitiga, walked through the formalities, and driven into a city almost nobody you know has seen. Tripoli's old town is Ottoman, Italian and Roman stacked on top of each other: the Arch of Marcus Aurelius has stood since 165 AD, hemmed in now by houses. The Red Castle looks over Martyrs' Square, where Gaddafi gave his speeches and where the crowds came out in 2011. In the Gurgi Mosque the tilework and the carved marble are Ottoman at its best, and the House of Yusuf Karamanli belonged to the pasha who once made the young United States pay tribute to stop his corsairs — and then didn't.
Fly east into Cyrenaica, which is a different country in every way that matters — Greek instead of Phoenician, green instead of desert, and until recently entirely closed. Apollonia was the port of Cyrene, and half of it is now under the sea; you walk the Byzantine basilicas on the shore and look at the columns standing in the water. Overnight in Al Bayda, up on the Jebel Akhdar, the Green Mountain.
Cyrene is one of the great classical cities of the world and hardly anybody has been there. Founded by Greeks from Thera in 631 BC on the word of the Delphic oracle, it became the intellectual centre of the ancient world's southern shore — Callimachus and Eratosthenes came from here, the man who measured the circumference of the Earth. The Temple of Zeus is bigger than the Parthenon. The sanctuary of Apollo runs down the hillside in terraces to a spring that has never stopped flowing. Then the Byzantine churches on the coast, their mosaic floors open to the sky.
Qasr Libya holds fifty Byzantine mosaic panels found by accident in 1957 — one of them is a depiction of the Pharos of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders, and it is the only image of it that survives. Then Ptolemais on the coast, a Hellenistic city with its street grid, its cisterns and its villas still legible in the ground. Benghazi in the evening, and the flight west.
Leptis Magna is the reason to come to Libya. It is the best-preserved Roman city on the Mediterranean and it is not a near thing — Pompeii is more famous, Leptis is more complete. Septimius Severus was born here, became emperor, and spent a fortune rebuilding his home town in marble: a basilica, a forum, a theatre, a four-way arch, baths that still have their plunge pools. Then sand buried it for thirteen centuries, which is why it survived. You will likely have it almost to yourself. The Corniche in the late afternoon, and the sea.
Sabratha last, on the coast west of Tripoli, and most people end up preferring it to Leptis — because you can see the Mediterranean from anywhere in the ruins, and because of the theatre. Three storeys of columns still standing behind the stage, the best Roman theatre façade anywhere in Africa. It was a Phoenician port before it was Roman. Then the airport, and the end of our services.
