Museum sights in Alexandria
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Alexandria National Museum
The excellent Alexandria National Museum sets new benchmarks for summing up Alexandria’s past. With a small, thoughtfully selected and well-labelled collection singled out from Alexandria’s other museums, it does a sterling job of relating the city’s history from antiquity until the modern period. Housed in a beautifully restored Italianate villa, it stocks several thousand years of Alexandrian history, arranged chronologically over three cryogenically air-conditioned floors.
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B
Cavafy Museum
Cavafy's flat is now preserved as the Cavafy Museum, with two of the six rooms arranged as Cavafy kept them. Editions of the poet’s publications and photocopies of his manuscripts, notebooks and correspondence lie spread out on tables throughout the rooms. Note that the museum is on a 2nd-floor walk-up and there are no elevators.
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Antiquities Museum
In the Alexandria library's basement is the Antiquities Museum, containing some overspill from the Graeco-Roman Museum, including a fine Roman mosaic of a dog discovered when the foundations of the library were dug. Free high-tech PDA guides are available in English, Arabic and French.
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Mahmoud Said Museum
The Mahmoud Said Museum presents about 40 of Mahmoud Said's works housed in the beautiful Italianate villa in which he once lived.
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C
Beit Killi Museum
The Beit Killi Museum, on the main square, off the Corniche, was closed for restoration at the time of research, but should be open now.
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Culturama
Culturama is an interactive show (15 to 30 minutes) portraying Egypt's history on nine screens.
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Manuscript Museum
Contains ancient manuscripts and antiquarian books, and a temporary art exhibition space.
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D
Graeco-Roman Museum
One of the sights not to miss is the large collection of realistic terracotta statuettes (tanagra) from the Hellenistic period. Also look for three different carved heads representing the city's founder, Alexander. From the Delta region, an impressive wall-hung mosaic from the 3rd century BC portrays Berenice, wife of Ptolemy III. Equally impressive is the giant Apis bull in basalt from the time of Hadrian, found at the Serapeum, and two carvings of the god Serapis - one in wood, the other in marble. Serapis is a wholly Alexandrian creation, a divinity part Egyptian (the husband of Isis) and part Greek, with echoes of Zeus and Poseidon. Ptolemy I promoted him as a way of …
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Royal Jewellery Museum
It's not easy, in a country with such a long line of monarchs, to make a name for yourself, but Farouk, the last king of Egypt, succeeded. Renowned for extravagance, excess, womanising and a love of gambling, he once lost US$150,000 in a single sitting at the gaming tables, at a time when the majority of his subjects struggled in poverty. The 1952 Revolution would no doubt have happened without him, but his decadence only hastened the demise of the house of Mohammed Ali.
The Royal Jewellery Museum is a testament to his excesses, housing a glitzy collection of personal and family heirlooms. Aside from the standard (medals, jewels etc), exhibits include diamond-encrusted ga…
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