egypt

I had dreamed of embarking on this journey since I was a child, electrocuted by the civilisation of the pharaohs, the “morning and evening asters”. I remember that at eight years old, I had even assembled some dried papyrus and made my first piece of paper, fantasising about the famous silt of the Nile valley. Growing up, ten years after the Tahrir Square protests, I wanted to see what was left of that gigantic past, down in the Levant, and what Egypt meant today. Landing in Luxor, I boarded a motorboat on the Nile, docking at Edfu, Esna, Kom Ombo, File, Aswan, Abu Simbel, then with an internal flight I reached Cairo and Giza. I have completed this travel account, perhaps because with the years a sort of demand for completeness took over, or more because I felt the need to draw conclusions on the complexity, on the dark lights of a country that knows how to intimidate in the present, and at the same time interdict, through the incomparable vestiges of the past.