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Housed in a restored Italianate villa, the Alexandria National Museum tells the layered story of the city across three floors, moving neatly from pharaonic through Greco-Roman to Coptic and Islamic eras. It's an elegant, manageable collection, curated to make sense of Alexandria's unusually cosmopolitan past.

Highlights include finds recovered from the sunken palaces and shipwrecks in the harbour, statuary, mosaics, coins and everyday objects that bring the Ptolemaic and Roman city vividly to life. The former merchant's mansion setting adds a quiet elegance rare among Egyptian museums.

It's the ideal orientation stop before exploring the Roman theatre, catacombs and citadel scattered across the modern city.