Photo : Ahmedsalahemam — CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Alexandria · Shatby
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
A 2002 library that has nothing of the ancient one but its name, and a reading room on eleven terraces.
The building is a tilted disc a hundred and sixty metres across, opened in 2002 to a design by the Norwegian practice Snøhetta; its outer wall of Aswan granite is carved with characters taken from scores of the world's writing systems. Inside, the reading room steps down over eleven terraces under a north-facing glass roof, and that is what the visit is really for. The ancient library itself vanished in antiquity: its walls have never been found, and nothing you see here comes from it. The complex also holds a planetarium and several museums, among them an antiquities museum and a manuscript museum.
The extra bit
Start on the upper walkway: from there you take in all eleven terraces at once, which you cannot do from below. Then work down level by level, and keep the basement museums for last.
Know before you go
You are walking into a working library before you are walking into a monument. Silence in the reading room, bags in the cloakroom, and a marked route rather than a wander among the readers. The museums and the planetarium are ticketed separately. If you came for antiquity, go to the Roman theatre or Kom el-Shoqafa first: everything here dates from this century. What holds children here is the planetarium and the basement museums — not the reading room.
