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.
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