Algeria reminds us that the current of colonisation doesn’t always run just one way

As you glide in to land at the airport outside Algiers, the landscape resembles that of Tuscany: a coastal plain laced with vineyards giving way to low hills filled with chequerboards of olive groves and slopes of newly harvested wheat fields. Beyond rise blue mountains with windbreaks of holm oaks where storks glide into land on their nests atop the minarets of the village mosques. It was while walking in these hills, a week into our Algerian holiday, that we came across a most unexpected discovery. On the lee of a slope overlooking the old Roman town of Tiddis, we found a large round burial monument that looked a little like a miniature version of the drum of Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome, originally built as the tomb of Hadrian. The similarity was perhaps intentional, for the tomb was erected to commemorate a local boy made good, a protégé of that same Roman emperor.