Alexandria, Egypt. The role of the harbours and fortifications in the formation of the Mediterranean city’s image

Abstract

The relation and drawings Italian traveller Pellegrino Brocardi did, during his pilgrimage travel through Egypt to the Holy Land (1556), bear witness to the extraordinary archaeological and historical consistency of the harbours and fortifications sites of the Mediterranean shores. Particularly the descriptions and the drawings reveal, still recognizable, the major elements of the mythical ancient city of Alexandria: the structure of the Hellenistic town founded by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C., the obelisks and the Roman remains, the harbours, the fortress built on the ruins of the ancient gigantic Pharos. The richness of historical features and the complex stratification of sites, combined with the defensive reasons and technics of the fortifications, is a major heritage, to defend and improve, of the cities overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. This heritage, enhanced by the images drawn in the plates of the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte (1809), is able to characterize, still today, the urban landscape of an extraordinary Mediterranean city such as Alexandria of Egypt.