Author
Mercedes Volait
is CNRS research professor at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, where she heads the unit devoted to architecture and antiquarianism in the modern Mediterranean. She also edits the digital journal Architecture Beyond Europe and is currently working on a catalogue raisonné of nineteenth-century photographer Beniamino Facchinelli’s Cairo work.
Articles by this author
Most of the first buildings developed in Khedivial Cairo following 1868 were gone only a couple of decades later. This is a history of the modern city's earliest days.
The story of a building on Madabegh Street that played a pivotal role in Egypt’s nascent art scene. Built by a French entrepreneur and eventual home to Egypt’s first art society and to the era’s most important antiquities dealer, it stands witness to the birth of the modern art movement in Egypt.