Areas of Origin and Residence
Before 1952, Italians formed the second largest expatriate community in Egypt, after the Greeks. The 1882 census of Egypt recorded 18,665 Italians in the country. By 1897 the figure rose to 24,454 and 30 years later to 52,462. Thus, the Italian community increased by 122 per cent in those years.
Writing in Al-Ahram of 19 February 1933, under the headline, "The Italians in Egypt", the Italian historian Angelo San Marco wrote, "The Venetians and the people from Trieste, Dalmatia, Genoa, Pisa, Livorno, Naples and Sicily continued to reside in Egypt long after their native cities fell into decay and lost their status as maritime centres with the decline of the Mediterranean as a major thoroughfare for world trade."
Elsewhere in the article, San Marco writes that the Italian community in Egypt held monopolies on the goods that were still popular in the East, which included many imports. The majority of the Italian community lived in either Cairo or Alexandria, with 18,575 in the former and 24,280 in the latter, according to the 1928 census.
Italians tended to live in exclusively Italian neighbourhoods or in neighbourhoods with other foreigners. Perhaps the most famous of these districts in Cairo was known as the "Venetian Quarter". Nevertheless, San Marco notes that, in order to avoid harassment, the Italians tended to wear Egyptian dress and follow, as much as possible, Egyptian customs.
Read more about this topic: Italian Egyptians
Famous quotes containing the words areas of, areas, origin and/or residence:
“Helping children at a level of genuine intellectual inquiry takes imagination on the part of the adult. Even more, it takes the courage to become a resource in unfamiliar areas of knowledge and in ones for which one has no taste. But parents, no less than teachers, must respect a child’s mind and not exploit it for their own vanity or ambition, or to soothe their own anxiety.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Adults understandably assume that the level of verbal proficiency a five-year-old displays represents his level of proficiency in all areas of functioning—if he talks like an adult, he must think and feel like one. However, five-year-olds,... belie the promise of adult-like behavior with their child-like, impulsive actions.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed,—a, to me, equally mysterious origin for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you would feel the full force of a tempest, take up your residence on the top of Mount Washington, or at the Highland Light, in Truro.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)