its first floors into the subterranean floors. Re-discovery Drifting sand protected the abandoned sites, which were forgotten until the first excavations were begun in 1906, in part spurred by the destruction of the monumental entrance to the Roman city. The forum, surrounded by porticoes, was excavated 1949–52. Its public basilica had an apse at each end. As a cathedral, it had a highly unusual cruciform baptismal font inserted in the center of the rear (west end) of its nave. Its small amphitheater, the subject of a reproach in a sermon of Augustine of Hippo, retains the crispness of its edges and steps because it lay buried until 1960–61. Museum and archeological site Bulla Regia is now an archeological site. There is a museum, and underground tours are available. Restoration work aims to protect the buildings, which are well-preserved due to being largely built underground. Most of the elaborate polychrome mosaics are being conserved in-situ, allowing visitors to see them in their original architectural context. The Roman drainage system has been restored to keep the houses from flooding. Buildings In the unique domus architecture developed in the city, a ground-level storey, open to the warming winter sun, stood above a subterranean level, built round a two-story atrium. Open-bottomed terracotta bottle-shapes were built into vaulting. Water sprinkled on the floors brought the colors of the mosaics to life while they provided cooling by evaporation. In the House of the Hunt, the basilica, with an apse at its head, a transept and dependent spaces opening into what would be the nave if it were a church, has been instanced (Thébert) as an example of the conjunction between public architecture and the domus of the ruling class in the fourth century, spaces soon to be Christianized as churches and cathedrals. The subtle colors and shading and the modelling of three-dimensional forms of the finest mosaics at Bulla Regia are not surpassed by any in North Africa, where the Roman art of mosaic floors reached its fullest development. The mosaic of a haloed Amphitrite (House of Amphitrite) is often illustrated (see image above). Religion Bulla Regia was important enough to become a bishopric, suffragan of Carthage, which transformed the civil basilica into its cathedral. Bulla Regia was the seat of an ancient bishopric bearing its name. The bishopric was founded during the Roman Empire and survived through the Arian Vandal Kingdom and Orthodox Byzantine Empire,