For the attentive traveler, a ride on the TGM – the Tunis, La Goulette, and La Marsa, a light railway linking Tunis with a string of suburbs along the Gulf of Tunis – can become an extraordinary trip through the country’s history and culture. Not far from the end of the line in La Marsa are the remains of a sixteenth-century palace where Tunisia’s rulers passed the summer months to avail themselves of the sea breezes and where, in 1882, the reigning bey signed the document establishing a French protectorate over his country. A mile down the tracks, the train reaches Sidi Bou Said, a village that welcomed Muslims fleeing from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and that has been, for many years, a favorite haunt of local and European artists. The Museum of Traditional Music and Musical Instruments, located in what was the home of Baron Rudolphe d’Erlanger (1872–1932), honors the work of this French scholar who spent years helping Tunisian musicians preserve the Andalusian melodies and techniques brought to “Sidi Bou” by their refugee forefathers.

The next six TGM stops, spread out over two or three miles, are all in Carthage. Two bear the names of the ancient city’s most famous father and son, Amilcar and Hannibal. Down the hill from the Amilcar station is a hotel built in the early days of the campaign to attract European tourists to the newly independent country’s beaches. A few hundred yards west of the station, a World War II military cemetery – one of many British, French, German, and US burial grounds scattered across Tunisia along the battle lines of 1942 and 1943 – memorializes the men who fought in North Africa and shelters the remains of almost three thousand American soldiers.