Founded by Alexander the Great over 2300 years ago, Alexandria has belonged both to the Mediterranean and to Egypt, a luxuriant out-planting of Europe on the coast of Africa, but also a city of the East - the fabled cosmopolitan town that fascinated travellers, writers, and poets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where French and Arabic, Italian and Greek were spoken in the cafés and on the streets.
In the pages of An Alexandria Anthology we follow the delight of travellers discovering the strangeness of the city and its variety and pleasures. Most of all they are haunted by the city's resplendent past - the famous Library, the temple built by Cleopatra for Antony, the great Pharos lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world, of which only traces remain: we follow our travellers here too as they voyage through an immense ghost city of the imagination.