In 1872, Ismail Pasha, the khedive of Egypt, was the first to adopt the European custom of positioning heroic statues on public display as a symbolic message of the continuing authority of the ruling Muhammad Ali dynasty to which he belonged, but it was not until the early twentieth century and the determination of sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar that such public art gained general acceptance, and today statues stand, ride, or sit in the streets, squares, and gardens of Cairo. Each sculpture adds a piece to the jigsaw of history spanning personalities and events that shaped the city and wider Egypt from 1805 to 1970, and here Cairo-based author Lesley Lababidi provides a unique perspective on Egyptian history through looking at more than thirty statues and monumental sculptures and the stories behind them. Between statues, she explores Cairo’s growth and its multidimensional identity, as manifested in the development and changing use of city space over the centuries, and examines the relationship of Cairo’s modern denizens with the landscapes, districts, palaces, archaeological sites, cafés, bridges, and gardens of their great and maddening city, the Mother of the World. Illustrated throughout with color photographs and archival pictures, Cairo’s Street Stories presents a unique and lively view of the history that fashioned the city’s streets and open spaces, and of the many and often unexpected uses to which its inventive inhabitants put them.
Cairo’s Street Stories
Exploring the City’s Statues, Squares, Bridges, Gardens, and Sidewalk Cafés
Lesley Lababidi
15 April 2008
152 pp.
Over 100 color illus.
16.5X23.5cm
ISBN 9789774161537
For sale worldwide
$24.95
Related products

High above Egypt’s Desert and Oases
Marcello Bertinetti Foreword by Omar Sharif
$19.95
Buy Now
High above Egypt’s Desert and Oases
Marcello BertinettiForeword byOmar Sharif
Photographed from the sky, Egypt shows the best of itself. The course of the Nile, which cuts the desert in two from north to south, and the enormous Delta provide glorious, lush vegetation sliced by a deep blue band. The white sails that slide over its waters and the spectacular monuments that line its banks, the human ants’ nest of Cairo, the Pyramids and the Sphinx, palm groves and fertile fields, rocky mountains, coral seas, and the ever-changing waves of the dunes in the desert: all of Egypt’s magical panoramas and incomparable light are offered here in this series of five spectacular new books, together constituting the greatest collection of aerial views of the country ever made.
...read more
Hardbound
128 pp.color photographs
22.5X15cm
$19.95

A Cairo Anthology
Two Hundred Years of Travel Writing
Edited by Deborah Manley
$18.95
Buy Now
A Cairo Anthology
Two Hundred Years of Travel Writing
Edited by Deborah ManleyCairo has long been recognized as one of the great cities of the world, and many travelers have recorded their descriptions of it over the centuries—from the early eye-witness account of Herodotus to the reflections of Sir Richard Burton, Florence Nightingale, and Mark Twain.
A Cairo Anthology gathers together the impressions of many of these writers: with them we experience the excitement of exploring the great city, through its crowded streets and colorful bazaars, we enter the hotels, hire donkeys, ascend to the historic Citadel, and look out across the Nile toward the Sphinx and the Pyramids, and we visit those vast monuments that are in reality always larger and more extraordinary than one can believe, and climb to their summits to gaze back at Cairo, the Mother of the World.
...read more
30 November 2013
Hardbound
160 pp.27 b/w illus.
12X16cm
$18.95

A Nile Anthology
Travel Writing through the Centuries
Edited by Deborah Manley Sahar Abdel-Hakim
$18.95
Buy Now
A Nile Anthology
Travel Writing through the Centuries
Edited by Deborah ManleySahar Abdel-Hakim
About the series: The elegant, pocket-sized volumes in the AUC Press Anthology series feature the writings and observations of travel writers and diarists through the centuries. Vivid and evocative travelers’ accounts of some of the world’s great cities and regions are enhanced by the exquisite vintage design in small hardback format that make the books ideal gift books as well as perfect travel companions. Designed on cream paper stock and beautifully illustrated with line drawings and archival photographs.
30 October 2015
Hardbound
164 pp.27 b/w illus.
12X16cm
$18.95

An Alexandria Anthology
Travel Writing through the Centuries
Edited by Michael Haag
$18.95
Buy Now
An Alexandria Anthology
Travel Writing through the Centuries
Edited by Michael HaagFounded by Alexander the Great over 2,300 years ago, Alexandria has belonged both to the Mediterranean and to Egypt, a luxuriant out-planting of Europe on the coast of Africa, but also a city of the East—the fabled cosmopolitan town that fascinated travelers, writers, and poets in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where French and Arabic, Italian and Greek were spoken in the cafés and on the streets. In the pages of An Alexandria Anthology, we follow the delight of travelers discovering the strangeness of the city and its variety and pleasures. Most of all they are haunted by the city’s resplendent past—the famous Library, the temple built by Cleopatra for Antony, the great Pharos lighthouse, one of the seven wonders of the world, of which only traces remain—we follow our travelers here too as they voyage through an immense ghost city of the imagination. About the series: The elegant, pocket-sized volumes in the AUC Press Anthology series feature the writings and observations of travel writers and diarists through the centuries. Vivid and evocative travelers’ accounts of some of the world’s great cities and regions are enhanced by the exquisite vintage design in small hardback format that make the books ideal gift books as well as perfect travel companions. Designed on cream paper stock and beautifully illustrated with line drawings and archival photographs.
...read more
14 January 2015
Hardbound
168 pp.24 b/w illus.
12X16cm
$18.95