The first major exhibition entirely dedicated to the history of one of the most powerful and fascinating cities of the ancient world.

The exhibition is set up in the monumental spaces of the Colosseum and the Roman Forum with over four hundred exhibits, brought from the most prestigious Italian and foreign museums, thanks to extraordinary loans, from the national museums of Carthage, the National Bardo Museum in Tunis, the National Museum of Beirut in Lebanon, the national archaeological museums of Madrid and Cartagena in Spain and many more.

The exhibition links the vicissitudes of Carthage and Rome, the two great powers of the ancient world, in a narrative layout that unfolds from the founding of the Phoenician East through the history of the city and its inhabitants, its expansion into the Mediterranean and the wealth of commercial and cultural exchanges in the phase extending from the Punic wars to the Augustan age, finally presenting the complexity of the process of Romanisation that led Rome to annihilate what had become its only fearsome rival for control of the sea in the Battle of the Aegadian Islands (241 BC). And from the Aegadian Islands come exhibits never displayed before, discovered in research campaigns carried out by the Sicilian Superintendence of the Sea.

The exhibition continues with the re-founding of the new Colonia Iulia Concordia Carthago, which throughout the imperial age would be distinguished by its area of over 200 hectares and which in effect became a city endowed with entertainment buildings and luxurious private homes, famous everywhere for the richness of their polychrome mosaics, of which some extraordinary specimens will be exhibited. It concludes with testimonies of the nascent Christian faith, of which Carthage later became the driving force, and with an appendix on the rediscovery of the city in the light of modern and contemporary imagery.