Bizerta

“Ben Negro, the home of the English consul, is fairly pretty. Its hall is decorated with arabesque stucco, marble columns and coloured bricks: all this material came from Le Bardo in Tunis. It was with great pain that I saw Le Bardo demolished!

The house was built by Arab workers under the supervision of an Austrian from Leitmeritz. The interior reveals refined taste. The stairwell is covered completely by blue and yellow bricks, slightly worn at the edges, but who cares! Everything makes you dream about the past. From the terrace where Arab artists painted frescoes featuring fantastic animals, you can see Bizerte “the White” in the distance between sleepy canals, as if it were an Oriental dream.

It’s nice to find a modern though traditional building because today’s architecture threatens to impose a complete lack of all local colour.”

Archduke Ludwig Salvator of Austria, Bizerte, J. Rothschild, Paris, 1900 (Prague, 1897)