Thursday, April 14, 2016
Assembly F (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
This paper explores time, materiality, and historical consciousness through the Italian inhabitants of the Casa di Riposo (elderly home) in Alexandria, Egypt. It argues that the lives - both those human and otherwise - of the Casa are material repositories for the long history of entanglements that continue to connect northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. Tucked behind three-meter walls, near the Alexandrian Library in Egypt, lives a small community of around 25 elderly Italians, many of whom have never left Egypt. Today, the halls of the Casa echo with their conversations. Most rooms are empty, their occupants having departed either from life or from Egypt. They inhabit what was once a vibrant community. In one room is an abandoned museum, appropriately named “The Time Machine.” It is little more than a collection of belongings of the departed. Photographs, empty suitcases, antique furniture, propped-up canes, and other objects fill the museum. The building itself was designed and built by Verrucci Bey in 1927, on land purchased from the Egyptian Government on a 99-year lease, and expanded in 1930. The once large community of Italians of Egypt (italiani d’Egitto) for which it was built - they numbered over 50,000 on the eve of the Second World War - has all but ceased to exist. Today only around 250 remain in Egypt, including those in Cairo. Although the Casa has outlasted the Italian Hospital, most of the Italian schools, and even the Italian Consulate in Alexandria, it too lives on borrowed time.
