Art Varieties in the Italian Architecture of Alexandria

Abstract

Speaking about heritage is speaking about the human accomplishment, no matter what its ethnic or roots are; & today as one is trying to point to some of the most important surviving modern heritage in our city.. Alexandria, we are in fact competing with time & neglect. Although that the very rich cosmopolitan architecture collection of Alexandria has always been like an opened book to our daily sight, many of us didn't notice that inside of this architecture there is also an opened gallery, which is full of different kinds of arts, many of these arts are really precious & going back to quite known European Artists & workshops from France, Italy, Greece, England, Germany, Switzerland & others; also some of these arts were nothing but good amateurs works, but in the end they are all representing an important heritage that is telling stories about its time. . Did they have a chance to survive? Did they have a chance to be preserved or well restored or at least to be seen? The answer is most of the time (no). These arts are very delicate, they were & still not documented, in fact they were always been hiding & hidden in the same time, thus I was not welcomed in most of places to document, shoot or watch and this is because of many reasons, mostly due to the very bad & tragic condition that most of works has become to. In fact The Italian architecture (civilian & religious) in Alexandria city at the cosmopolitan era, especially at the first half of the 20th century has often been a good example of being a mother of arts. These published papers were meant to document these arts, as much as the researcher could; despite all what we have lost, if we just can gather from here & there & document what still remains in Latin churches stores & basements ... perhaps in a private museum of the Latin heritage in the city or in Egypt in general, & I repeat Latin because other ethnics do not have the same problem like the Greek for example, if we can only show some respect especially when we claim that we are restoring these arts, we then would accomplish a great job in the name of human heritage.