The party's over

"Close to the casino a fashionable summer hotel by the side of a sea that seems specially fresh and blue. There are symphony concerts here in the season. The audience, however, comes not to listen but to talk; their noise is so great that from a little distance the orchestra appears to be performing in dumb show."

So E M Forster describes the San Stefano Hotel in the 1922 edition of Alexandria, a history and a guide. But time takes its toll on even the grandest of grand hotels, and the place that was once Alexandria's most fashionable watering hole resounds now not to animated gossip and intricate social manoeuvring, but to the rumble of bulldozers. San Stefano has finally been reduced to rubble.

(photo:Randa Shaath)

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A final adieu