The Italian Community of Alexandria: A Vanished Mediterranean City

Quick Facts

Best time to visit: October to April, when Mediterranean heat is tolerable and the light on limestone facades turns gold by 4pm.

Entrance fees: Most Italian-era sites are public streets, churches, and cemeteries. The Latin Cemetery charges no entry. The Greek Orthodox Patriarchate charges no entry for the church. The Alexandria National Museum, which holds artifacts from the cosmopolitan era, charges EGP 180 (approx $3.60 USD), students EGP 90.

Opening hours: The Catholic Cathedral of St. Catherine on Moharram Bey is open daily 8am to 12pm and 4pm to 7pm. The Latin Cemetery in Chatby is accessible Saturday to Thursday 8am to 4pm, closed Friday. The Alexandria National Museum is open daily 9am to 4:30pm.

How to get there: From Cairo, take the air-conditioned Spanish train from Ramses Station (EGP 120 to 230 second class depending on service, roughly 2 to 2.5 hours). From Alexandria's Misr Station, the Italian-era neighborhoods of Ramleh, Moharram Bey, and Chatby are reachable by tram (EGP 3 flat fare, one of the cheapest rides in Egypt) or taxi (EGP 30 to 60 depending on destination and your negotiating patience).

Time needed: A focused half-day covers the cathedral, Chatby Cemetery, and the Ramleh tram corridor. A full day, done properly with the Alexandria National Museum and a walk through Attarine, reveals a city beneath the city.

Cost range: Budget EGP 400 to 700 per day. Mid-range EGP 1,500 to 2,500 per day including a good lunch at a surviving Mediterranean-style restaurant like Elite or Pastroudis.

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Why This Place Matters

Between 1850 and 1950, Alexandria was not an Egyptian city that happened to have foreigners in it. It was a Mediterranean city that happened to be located on Egyptian soil. At the 1927 census, the city's population included 100,000 Italians, 75,000 Greeks, 40,000 Levantine Jews, and communities of Maltese, French, British, and Armenian residents, all living in a city governed by a system of mixed courts where no single nationality's law held complete jurisdiction. This was not colonial tolerance. It was structured legal pluralism, and it produced one of the most architecturally complex and culturally strange cities in the world.

The Italians were the largest European community. They ran the bakeries, the pharmacies, the marble workshops, the tailoring houses. They built the art nouveau facades along Fouad Street (now 26th of July Street) that you walk past today without knowing what you are looking at. They named their children after saints whose feast days fell in Egyptian summer heat. They prayed in a cathedral modeled on Rome and buried their dead in a cemetery whose inscriptions are still legible, still moving, still specific about what people lost and where they came from.

The whole community was gone within a generation. Nasser's nationalizations between 1956 and 1961 made it legally and economically impossible for most foreign nationals to remain. Some families left for Italy having never lived there. Their grandparents had been born in Alexandria. They arrived in Palermo or Naples speaking Arabic and feeling nothing like Italians.

The city they left behind is not ruins. It is occupied, inhabited, repurposed, and largely unacknowledged. Learning to see it requires a different kind of attention.

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What Survived and Where to Find It

The Architecture of Ramleh and Downtown

Walk east from Saad Zaghloul Square along the tram line and pay attention to the upper floors of buildings. Alexandrian merchants and property developers from the 1890s through the 1930s hired Italian architects to design apartment buildings and commercial facades in a hybrid style that borrowed from Haussmann's Paris, from Viennese Secession, and from Italian Liberty (the local name for art nouveau). The ground floors have been redone in aluminum shopfronts and mobile phone signage. But above the second floor, the original plasterwork, the ironwork balconies, the carved stone medallions, and the ceramic tile inserts survive almost intact.

The Amir Palace on Fouad Street, built in 1926, has a roofline that could stand comfortably in Trieste. The building at the corner of Safiya Zaghloul and Abdel Salam Aref has Florentine grotesque masks above the third-floor windows, which is a strange thing to encounter above an Egyptian mobile phone shop. These buildings were designed and in many cases physically built by Italian craftsmen whose names appear in the Alexandria telephone directory of 1930 and nowhere else in the historical record.

The Latin Cemetery at Chatby

This is where the Italian community history of Alexandria becomes most directly readable. The Chatby cemeteries, built on land that was already ancient when the first European grave was dug there in the 1840s (the site sits above a Hellenistic necropolis from the third century BC), contain the graves of Italian families across four and five generations. You can trace a family's entire arc: the grandfather who arrived from Palermo in 1880, the children born in Alexandria, the grandchildren who died in local hospitals during the wars, and then nothing, because the fourth generation left in 1962 and is buried somewhere else entirely.

The inscriptions are bilingual in many cases, Italian and Arabic together on the same stone. Some graves have photographs sealed behind glass, still visible: men in suits, women in early twentieth century Alexandrian fashion, children who died before the family's world collapsed. The cemetery is neither well-maintained nor derelict. It occupies a middle state of dignified neglect, which is more honest than most memorial sites manage to be.

One thing almost no visitor knows: the Chatby site also contains what archaeologists believe is the earliest example of a Greek-style tomb chapel in Egypt, dating to approximately 325 BC, which means you are walking through three thousand years of burial practice in a single afternoon.

The Catholic Cathedral of St. Catherine

Built in 1833, rebuilt and expanded in 1883, the Cathedral of St. Catherine on Moharram Bey served as the center of Italian Catholic community life in Alexandria for over a century. It is not a grand building by Roman standards. But inside, the quality of the marble work, the carved confessionals, and the side chapel mosaics reflects the specific wealth and craft sensibility of a community that could afford to import Italian artisans for religious projects because Italian artisans were already there, building apartment blocks down the road.

Mass is still held here. The congregation is tiny, mostly elderly Egyptian Coptic Catholics and a handful of expatriates. The priest on most Sundays as of recent years is Nigerian. The hymns are in Italian. The incense is the same incense. The continuity is genuinely strange and genuinely moving, and it is the opposite of a museum.

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The Connections: Nothing in Alexandria Exists Alone

The Italian community did not arrive into a blank city. They arrived into a place that had already been Pharaonic, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Fatimid, Ottoman, and French (for three years, which was long enough for Napoleon's savants to begin mapping it). The building plots where Italian merchants constructed their Liberty-style apartment houses often sat on top of Roman foundations, which sat on top of Ptolemaic structures that archaeologists are still finding.

The mixed courts that gave the Italian community its legal standing had been established in 1876, partly in response to pressure from the Khedive Ismail, who understood that foreign investment required foreign legal protection. Ismail had been educated in Paris. His vision of Alexandria as a Mediterranean capital was explicitly modeled on Haussmann's transformation of Paris, and he hired European engineers and architects to execute it. The Italians who came to build his streets and mansions stayed to build their own.

The connection to modern Alexandria is not sentimental. The tram system the Italians rode is still running, one of the oldest operating urban tram networks in Africa, built by a Belgian company in 1863 and electrified in 1902. The fare has changed. The route has not changed much. The trams themselves are different carriages, but on the same tracks. When you take the tram from Ramleh to Chatby, you are making a journey that Italian Alexandrians made every week for a hundred years. They were going to visit their dead. You are going to visit the same dead, slightly later.

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Common Mistakes

Treating this as a ghost-tourism exercise. The Italian community history of Alexandria is not primarily a story of what was lost. The city is alive and inhabited. Approach it as a palimpsest, not a cemetery. Talk to the shop owners on Fouad Street who have no idea who designed the building they work in.

Going to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina for history. The library is architecturally interesting and the permanent exhibition on Alexandria's ancient manuscripts has real value. But the Bibliotheca tells the story of ancient Alexandria very well and the cosmopolitan twentieth-century city almost not at all. For the Italian community specifically, the Shallalat Gardens area and the Alexandria National Museum's modern history section are more useful.

Skipping the Alexandria National Museum in favor of the Roman Amphitheater. The amphitheater (Kom el-Dikka) is worth a quick visit, but the National Museum on Tariq al-Hurriyah contains artifacts from the Italian and broader cosmopolitan period, including photographs, furniture, and personal objects from European-Alexandrian families. It costs EGP 180 and most international tourists have never heard of it.

The sound and light show at Qaitbay Citadel costs EGP 300 and tells you nothing specific about Alexandria's Italian or cosmopolitan history. Skip it entirely and use the money for a long lunch at Elite Restaurant on Safia Zaghloul Street, which has been serving the same menu in the same room since 1942, and whose mirrors and wooden booths are a primary source in themselves.

Going to the wrong cemetery. Alexandria has Greek, Jewish, Armenian, Italian, and British cemeteries, all in the Chatby neighborhood, all adjacent. The Latin (Catholic) Cemetery is the one most relevant to the Italian community. It is sometimes locked outside posted hours. Go in the morning, go on a weekday, and bring small cash in case a caretaker needs to be found.

Expecting legible signage. Almost none of the Italian-era buildings are marked or explained. This is partly a resource problem and partly a political one. The cosmopolitan period sits uncomfortably in Egyptian national history because it was also a period of colonial pressure and foreign economic control. Bring the 1979 Michael Haag guide to Alexandria, which is out of print but findable in PDF, or Robert Ilbert's historical scholarship on the cosmopolitan city, which is the serious academic baseline.

Underestimating how much the light matters. Alexandria in January at 4pm has a Mediterranean afternoon light that exists nowhere else in Egypt. The limestone facades of Italian-era buildings go amber and then almost orange. This is when the neighborhood photographs reveal their depth. Plan accordingly.

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Practical Tips

Arrive from Cairo on an early train, no later than the 8am departure, to have the morning light and the full day. Book return trains in advance, especially on Thursday and Friday afternoons when the Cairo-Alexandria line is packed.

The Ramleh tram is slow and the route is not always obvious to first-time riders. Ask the conductor or a fellow passenger. Egyptians on the tram are generally willing to help and amused that a foreigner is on the tram at all. This is the correct mode of transport for this particular investigation.

Elite Restaurant on Safia Zaghloul Street opened in 1942 and still serves escalope and mahshi in a room whose decor has changed almost nothing since then. It is not expensive (a full lunch runs EGP 300 to 500), it is not famous on international travel sites, and it is the most intact surviving example of the kind of space the Italian community ate and socialized in. Eat there.

If you read Italian, bring a notebook. The cemetery inscriptions reward slow reading. If you do not read Italian, the names and dates alone are enough to reconstruct the community's shape: the clustering of Sicilian and Calabrian surnames in the older sections, the gradual appearance of Egyptian-born names in the newer ones, and then the abrupt stop.

The neighborhood around Attarine, Alexandria's antique market, occasionally surfaces objects from the cosmopolitan period: Italian-language Alexandria telephone books, family photographs, ceramic pieces from European-Alexandrian households. The quality and legality of the market varies. Go to look, not necessarily to buy.