Alexandria

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a deliberate modern echo of the lost ancient library, and the building itself is the main event: a vast tilted disc of grey Aswan granite whose outer wall is carved with letters and characters from around 120 of the world's writing systems, angled toward the sea like a second rising sun. Inside, the main reading room is one of the largest on earth, stepping down over cascading terraces beneath a great slanted glass roof, and you can walk the galleries above it even without a reader's card. The complex is really a cultural campus, holding several museums (antiquities, manuscripts, and the Sadat museum), rotating art shows, a planetarium in a suspended sphere out front, and archives of rare books and maps. Guided tours run regularly and are worth taking to make sense of the symbolism built into the design. Give it a couple of hours, and photograph the reading hall from the upper viewing gallery.

Qaitbay Fort stands on the tip of a spit at the mouth of the Eastern Harbour, on the exact spot where the Pharos Lighthouse, one of the Seven Wonders, stood until earthquakes finally toppled it in the 1300s. Sultan Qaitbay raised the fortress in the 1480s partly from the lighthouse's own fallen stone, and if you look closely at the base of the walls you can pick out recycled pink granite columns laid on their sides. The squat white keep is compact but atmospheric: you climb tight spiral stairs through cannon galleries and a little mosque to rooftop ramparts with a full sweep of the harbour, the fishing fleet, and the corniche curving away toward downtown. The setting is the real draw, with sea on three sides, spray on the rocks, and families fishing along the causeway. Divers have mapped fallen lighthouse blocks and ancient sphinxes lying in the harbour just offshore, though that underwater site is not casually accessible.

The Corniche is Alexandria's spine and its social heart, a broad seafront boulevard that runs in a great curve for more than fifteen kilometres from Qaitbay past downtown to Montaza. It is less a sight than the stage on which the city lives. In the evening families spread out along the sea wall, boys dive off the rocks, vendors sell grilled corn and termis (lupini beans) and freshly pressed sugarcane juice, and the whole promenade fills with people taking the breeze. Behind it stands a wall of weathered Italianate and Art Deco apartment blocks, survivors of the cosmopolitan city of the early twentieth century, when Greeks, Italians, and Levantines shared this seafront. The stretch around Raml Station and Saad Zaghloul Square is the liveliest, near the old Trianon and Delices cafes and the historic Cecil Hotel. A caleche (horse carriage) ride or a slow walk at dusk is how locals do it.

Discovered by accident in 1900, when a donkey is said to have fallen through the ground, the Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa are the largest known Roman burial complex in Egypt and the strangest sight in the city. You descend a spiral staircase wrapped around a deep central shaft, once used to lower the dead by rope, into three levels cut into the rock (the lowest now flooded and closed). The showpiece is a burial chamber where two worlds collide: an Egyptian-style tomb guarded by the god Anubis, but Anubis dressed as a Roman legionary, and pharaonic figures carved with Greco-Roman faces and drapery. A separate space, the Hall of Caracalla, holds the bones of people and horses tied to a Roman massacre. The name means mound of shards, after the broken pottery left by mourners who held funeral feasts down here. It is cool, dim, and genuinely eerie, unlike anywhere else in Egypt.

At the eastern end of the city, the Montaza gardens sprawl over hundreds of acres of pine and palm along a rocky, cove-cut shoreline that was once the summer estate of Egypt's royal family. The centrepiece is the Haramlik Palace, a florid blend of Turkish and Florentine styles built by King Fuad in the 1930s, with a tall clock tower modelled loosely on Florence's Palazzo Vecchio; the interior is generally closed, so the grounds are the point. You pay to enter and wander manicured lawns, shady groves, and a much-photographed curved bridge out to a small island, with private-feeling beaches tucked into the coves below. It is a favourite weekend picnic spot for Alexandrian families and a real green escape from the dense city. A couple of hotels sit inside the estate, so you can also come simply for a meal or a beach day with the palace as a backdrop and the Mediterranean in front of you.

Pompey's Pillar is a single monumental column of polished red Aswan granite, close to twenty-seven metres tall, standing on the low hill of the ancient Serapeum, the temple of the god Serapis that was once one of Alexandria's grandest sacred sites. The name is a medieval mistake: Crusaders assumed it marked Pompey's grave, but an inscription on the base shows it was actually raised around 297 AD in honour of the emperor Diocletian. It is among the tallest ancient monolithic columns still standing where it was first set up. Around it lie the scattered remains of the temple complex, a pair of granite sphinxes, and, most interestingly, underground galleries that once held the Serapeum's sacred archives and part of the great library's overflow. The site is compact and open-air, more a quick stop than a half-day, but it carries huge weight as the last above-ground trace of ancient Alexandria's most important temple.