Alexandria as an Observatory of the Difficulties of Ancient Urban History

Alexandria’s urban planning, like that of Athens, Constantinople, and Rome, has been researched and mapped since the eighteenth century. The excavation operation carried out between 1864 and 1866, revolutionary in the history of archaeology both for its date and for the Egyptian nationality of its author, Mahmud el-Falaki, also revolutionized thinking on the city’s urban history. But its denigration by British archaeologists, led by David G. Hogarth, and by the first two Italian directors of the Graeco-Roman Museum, Giuseppe Botti and Evaristo Breccia, led to a backlash. Their successor, Achille Adriani, adopted a new topographical approach aimed at precisely locating data from earlier excavations and attempted to extract chronological information from them.