14. Sétif — The City That Kept Its Romans Close
Sétif is a busy modern city of nearly a million people, the economic capital of northeastern Algeria, and most travellers treat it primarily as a staging post for Djémila, 36 kilometres away. This is understandable but represents a missed opportunity. The Sétif Archaeological Museum holds one of the finest collections of Roman mosaics in the world — a staggering claim that turns out, on arrival, to be entirely justified. The centrepiece is the Triumph of Dionysus, a floor mosaic of cinematic scale and colour depicting the wine god in his chariot, surrounded by nymphs and tigers and grapes, alive with the joy of the feast. Nothing remotely like it exists outside a handful of the world’s great museums.
The city itself has the Ain El Fouara fountain, a neoclassical 19th-century construction with a reclining nude Algerian woman as its centrepiece — a statue that has had a tumultuous relationship with the conservative mores of successive eras and is a piece of public art with more back-story per square centimetre than almost anything else in the country. The Place de l’Indépendance and the French-era boulevards around it speak of a colonial city that had ambitions, while the 8 May 1945 Memorial reminds visitors of the massacre on that date, when French forces and settlers killed thousands of Algerians in the uprising that many historians mark as the beginning of the end of French Algeria.
