Bardo National Museum

Bardo National Museum is Housed for over a century in the heart of a beylical palace. It is Tunisia’s oldest museum and the largest in the world by its number of mosaics. It contains thousands of objects collected during excavations conducted across the country, displayed in about fifty rooms and galleries that trace Tunisia’s history from prehistory to the mid-20th century.

The museum owes its worldwide fame to its mosaic collection, considered the richest, most varied, and most refined. Among its finest pieces are the paintings depicting Virgil surrounded by muses, the floor showing Dionysus offering the vine to Ikarios, and the mosaic celebrating the triumph of Neptune.

Bardo National Museum : Major treasures

Beyond mosaics, the Bardo houses extraordinary pieces from other eras. The “hermaïon” – a conical altar from the Mousterian era (-40,000 years) made of over 4,000 flints, bones, and limestone balls – is considered one of humanity’s earliest spiritual expressions.
From the Punic period, highlights include a superb solid gold armor of a Campanian warrior, jewels, and the stele of a priest carrying a child to sacrifice. The Greek collection was enriched by excavations off the coast of Mahdia in the 1940s, recovering a 1.20 m bronze Agôn from a 1st-century shipwreck.

The Roman period provides most of the Bardo collections: mosaics, statuary, pottery, jewellery, coins, and everyday objects. The Islamic department, set in Arab-Islamic decor, displays manuscripts, jewellery, carved stones and wood, along with objects that belonged to the ruling family and a room dedicated to Jewish worship.