Tunisia is known for budget seaside packages but its potential for short breaks that combine culture with hedonism is relatively undiscovered. A shift in its tourism strategy is reflected in new hotels: half those built in the 1990s have been four- or five-star.
The capital, Tunis, is linked to the ancient site of Carthage by light railway, and its layered history can be seen in its archaeological digs. These show a multi-cultural past the country is keen to reclaim - not least to counter the perceived threat of Islamist revival posed by the banned Ennahda party in a country sandwiched between wartorn Algeria and the "pariah" Libya. The city's French nouvelle ville has tree-lined boulevards and cafes that lend it a northern Mediterranean feel: Tunisia is proud of the prominence of women in public and professional life (a third of its doctors are women), a presence reflected on the capital's streets: and then there are the "poor white" areas of the former colonial town, such as Piccola Sicilia (though their communities of Maltese, Sardinians and Greeks largely upped and left at independence).
Walking from the station along Tunis's Champs-Elysees, the Avenue Habib Bourguiba - named after the dictator declared senile and ousted by President Ben Ali - you can pause to read French newspapers in the Cafe de Paris or check the prices at the official craft shop before haggling in the souks.
Entering the Tunis Medina, or Arab walled town, you plunge into another era.
Founded in the late 7th century, shortly after the Arab conquest, it was the heart of Tunis until the French built their nouvelle ville. Now a UNESCO world-heritage site, its medieval labyrinth radiates from the great Zitouna (olive tree) mosque, a centre of Islamic teaching that rivalled Cairo's AlAzhar, with medersas or Koranic schools.
From the walls of the mosque (which bars visitors to all but the courtyard), a warren of high-vaulted souks is organised by wares, the "noble trades" nearest the mosque. Amid bridal baskets and birdcages, wooden puppets of the Arab hero Antar and the tourist tat of stuffed camels, are the perfumes of Souk el Attarine - with scents such as Nuit de Carthage or a good imitation Chanel Number 5 - and the Souk des Chechias, where tradesmen descended from Andalucian Arabs wave thistles to demonstrate how Tunisia's brushed-felt fezlike hats are made. Enterprisingly, they have added a line in felt baseball caps.
Joining the human flow dodging barrows of fennel and sugared almonds, you find a lived-in medina, with its bakeries and hammams. It is also relatively safe - though not known for night life except after dusk during Ramadan.
The salesmanship is unaggressive - though it may help to be taken for a Tunisian, as I was - albeit a snob insistent on replying in French when addressed in Arabic.
You can stop for a couscous or tagine quiche at the Restaurant Mahdaoui, which claims to be the oldest in Tunis and where a meal for two costs eight dinar (about £6) Or the lively Ottoman Cafe Mrabet on the Souk el Trouk (named after Turkish tailors), with its barley-sugar columns, raised matting floors, incense and hookahs, offers coffee scented with orange blossom water, and sweetened gunpowder tea in which pine kernels float with mint leaves.
Tunisian exteriors tend to be unimpressive, all craft and embellishment being reserved for the inside - tiles, lattices and fountains tantalisingly glimpsed through doorways. Arm yourself with scenes from Moufida Tlatli's haunting film The Silences of the Palace, about lingering droit du sei- gneur in the bey's palace on the cusp of independence. The Cairo interiors in Anthony Minghella's The English Patient were shot in Tunis.
Shops and restaurants can also offer glimpses of antique interiors. In the four-centuries-old Bazaar ed Dar on the corner of Souk el Trouk, the owners pause to explain varieties of carpet - kilim (woven); mergoum (embroidered); and zarbiya (knotted) - and point out motifs ranging from the tree of life to diamonds and triangular l'oeul de perdrix (partridge eye).
The embroidered Berber shawls, or backhnug, that were part of brides' trousseaux - white before marriage, then dyed cochineal red - can be worth thousands of pounds; we were preceded by an acquirer from the British Museum.
The Medina's Dar El Jeld restaurant, with its balconies and rooms separated by lattices, has delicious Tunisian food which is hot and spicy. The fiery red-pepper and garlic harissa put on the table with bread and olives sets the tone. The country also produces fine wines and aperitifs, such as sweet Muscat de Kalibie, thibarine (an aromatic herb liqueur made by the French monks) and boukha (fig liqueur). Creamy desserts are delicately flavoured with asida (pine kernels), balouza (hazlenuts) or zriga (rosewater).
There are intriguing sights of everyday life in the Tunisia of old in the Bardo museum, which has the best collection of Roman mosaics in the world and is housed in a 17th-century bey's palace; a mosaic of Virgil flanked by muses abuts the harem. Amid colossal gods and heroes, tables groan with fish and fowl, and gladiators wrestle under team sponsors' logos - the epitome of bread and circuses. Absorbing the Punic, early Christian and Islamic mosiacs and statues fuels the imagination for visits to the bare ruins from which they were rescued.
From Tunis, then, to Carthage on the light railway. According to Virgil's Aeneid, Carthage was founded in 814 BC by Phoenician seafarers (from modern-day Lebanon) led by Queen Elissa, or Dido, as "Kart Hadasht" or New City. After three Punic wars, it was finally vanquished by its Roman rivals in 146BC, when Rome ordered salt ploughed into the ground before building on the ruins a century later.
It is dominted by Roman remains - albeit remains depleted by plundering seafarers from as far away as Britain. Lacking its own legacy of records, it has been at the mercy not only of the victors but of their historians, who paint it as dominated by bloodlust and infant sacrifice. Yet the conquering arrogance with which the Romans raised their acropolis on the ruined Punic citadel at Byrsa, sinking huge buttresses and levelling the slopes with earth, has preserved thrilling traces of the civilisation they destroyed. Excavations of the landfill beneath the Roman floors revealed remnants of the six-storey houses from which the defeated Carthaginians reputedly hurled stones at the conquering legions. With a little imagination, you can picture these dwellings much as they were when the Cathaginian general Hannibal led his army of elephants over the Alps against Rome.
BYRSA, high above the Bay of Tunis, is a vantage point from which to grasp the area's layered history. At the summit stands the Cathedral of Saint Louis, a kitsch white confection imposed as a symbol of France's supremacy over Muslim Tunisia that lasted from 1881 until independence in 1956. French rule followed successive waves of invaders when the Mediterranean was, as its name suggests, the centre of the world - Phoenicians, Romans, Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Spaniards and Turks. Carthage, the Roman empire's third city, was a thriving North African metropolis until the Arabs founded their capital of Afriquiya in Tunis, visible a few miles away across a salt lake.
Meanwhile, at Salammbo are the Punic ports and the Tophet, the cemetery believed to have contained the remains of thousands of sacrificed infants and children in burial urns. Roman villas - some with mosaics in place where conservation funds ran out - overlook the Bay of Tunis and the ancient navigational aid of the twin-peaked Bourkomine mountain. Perhaps most awesome are the cathedral-high Antonine baths by the sea, rivalled only by those in Rome and fed from huge cisterns piped by aqueduct from the Zaghouan springs. After centuries of salt-air erosion, only a single pillar from the frigidarium has been resurrected to suggest their immense height, but the cramped area below stairs gives a hint of the infernal life of the slaves who stoked the patricians' central heating.