T HE FRUIT SELLERS along Ma’moun Street are clearly exasperated by the stream of literary pilgrims asking for number 19. “Foreigners lived here, but they died long ago,” one mutters. Another recommends the Montazah Palace as a more prominent tourist site. But the persistent tourist will eventually discover, behind a ruined fence and a rubble-strewn yard, the house where Lawrence Durrell lived for two years of his time in Alexandria.

Durrell came to Alexandria with his wife Nancy and their daughter Penelope in 1941, fleeing the Nazi invasion of Greece. It was a time of upheaval for him: He had left his beloved Greek islands, and his marriage was in trouble. Shortly after their arrival in Egypt, Nancy left for Palestine with their daughter. Durrell took a position as press officer with the British Consulate. He lived in a dank flat on Fouad Street with Paul Gotch, and naturally fell in with a group of writers and artists, including Clea Badaro. She would become a partial model for the character Clea in Durell’s The Alexandria Quartet. He also met Eve Cohen, a young Alexandrian Jew who would become his second wife and the model for Justine, Durrell’s most famous fictional character.

It was natural that Durrell, who had already gained some notoriety for his novel The Black Book, should bond with the artistic community in Alexandria. Perhaps the most prominent members of this community were Aldo and Amelia Ambron and their children. One of the wealthiest families in Alexandria, the Ambrons were themselves artists. Aldo Ambron was a noted art and book collector and a founding member of the Les amis de l’art (The Friends of Art) society. Amelia and one daughter, Gilda, were portrait artists; another daughter, Nora, was an accomplished musician; and their son Emilio, also an artist, later created a magnificent art collection (now the basis for a museum), in Bali, Indonesia.

At their villa on Maamoun Street, the Ambrons created spectacular grounds filled with exotic plants, marble sculptures, ancient granite columns and a magnificent banyan tree. Here, they feted the elite of Alexandria. Alessandro Loria, the celebrated Italian-Alexandrian architect of the Cecil Hotel, designed the atelier at the bottom of the garden where Amelia and Gilda Ambron and their friend Clea Badaro worked.

Prior to the Second World War, the Ambrons had rented out the second floor to a Syro-Lebanese family, the Debbanes. Max Debbane and his wife Nelly refurbished parts of the villa, and amassed the finest library in Alexandria, later acquired by the American University in Cairo. They also first noted a ghost, nicknamed Donald, who they say bedeviled the inhabitants of the villa. Max Debbane’s stepdaughter, Vera “Cheekie” Bajocchi, recalls how, “He often played with me and my younger sister. He would open doors and knock on the brass beds. He would also appear abruptly at windows.”

Durrell probably met Gilda Ambron through one of the fabulous parties at the villa. The Ambrons believed artists deserved patronage, and when she learned he was looking for an apartment, offered him the second floor of the villa. Upon moving in, Durrell immediately claimed the quaint octagonal tower atop the building to write in.

While Durrell lived on Fouad Street, Eve had been pretending to spend her nights at the Cozzika Hospital, though really co-habiting with her lover. But when Durrell relocated to the Ambron Villa, she gave up the charade and moved in with him. With Eve’s assistance, Durrell fixed up the tower, hanging curtains and ordering a specially designed curved desk. From this perch he had a view, as he wrote to Henry Miller, “of Pompei’s Pillar, Hadra Prison, and the wet reedy wastes of Lake Mareotis stretching away into the distance and blotting the sky.”

Though generally a garrulous socialite, Durrell guarded his writing space zealously, and only Eve was allowed into the tower. Here, in lofty solitude, Durrell wrote much of Prospero’s Cell, his celebrated travel narrative about Corfu, and made notes toward the Alexandria novel. By 1956, Justine was finished, and by 1960 he had completed the Quartet, the work that was to bring him fame, wealth and a nomination for the Nobel Prize.

He never forgot the generosity of the Ambrons, and in particular the friendship of Gilda. Upon learning of her death, he added her name by hand to the manuscript of Balthazar, the second volume of the Quartet. She is the only Alexandrian mentioned by name in the books.

After the war, the Ambron heirs rented out the villa, but it remained connected to the arts. Well-known Alexandrian artists Effat Nagui and her husband Saad Al-Khadim leased the building in the early 1960s and filled it with their collection of paintings and cultural artifacts. Nagui, one of the most prominent Egyptian artists, was the first Egyptian woman to have one of her works bought by the Museum of Modern Art in Cairo. Her mixed-media artworks incorporated elements from the Egyptian artistic heritage, including Pharaonic and Nubian art. “Art,” she wrote, “is the result of assimilated and inherited culture,” a statement Durrell would surely have agreed with, and her technique, involving layers and juxtapositions, interestingly complements Durrell’s kaleidoscopic prose. A museum devoted to the work of Nagui and Al-Khadim opened in Cairo in 2001.

In May 1995, soon after Nagui died, the Ambron heirs sold the villa to a building contractor. The house has since fallen into disrepair, and the great banyan tree and exotic flora have been uprooted. The top floor of the Loria-designed atelier has been destroyed. A construction company intended to demolish the house as well, but at a meeting of the UK Friends of the Alexandria Library, Paul Gotch, who had shared the second floor of the house with Durrell for a time, raised the issue. In a widely quoted speech, he declared that, “With the present rebuilding of the famous Alexandria Librarythe villa Ambron could be a continuation of the renowned literary tradition of the great city in this century.”

The issue began to receive international press, and the Egyptian government was forced to take notice. Following the intervention of high-ranking individuals including Ambassador. Adel El-Gazzar and Dr. Mohammed Awad, director of the Alexandria Preservation Trust, made a survey of the villa. He was recommended that it be preserved and an archeological survey be made of the grounds and the basement of the house.

In late 1998, the governor ordered that no demolition permits be issued for the house. But the survey Awad recommended was never undertaken, and the priceless artifacts have been removed to an unknown location. The grounds have since been usurped by high-rise concrete apartment buildings, blocking the view Durrell loved.

The fate of the house remains uncertain.

As Michael Haag, author of Alexandria: City of Memory, asserts, “Neglect and the surreptitious destruction of interior walls will soon bring the building down. Efforts at turning the house into a museum have so far come to naught.”

Awad, a frequent visitor when Nagui and Al-Khadim lived at the villa, recalls: “I campaigned for the conservation of the house, because they had already started illegal demolition.” Both the destruction of the top floor of the atelier and the construction in the garden were illegal, he claims, and fears that the contractors will continue to defy the city ruling and bring down the main villa itself.

“This is one of our most threatened monuments,” he says with a sigh. “I don’t think anybody will stop them anymore.” Awad is currently trying to bring attention to the villa by including it on a walking tour of the city he is developing for the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and by frequently lecturing on the topic. Though the building is rickety, he insists it is not too late: “Anything can be restored,” he declares.

Ahmed Abdul Fattah, general supervisor of Alexandrian Museums and Artifacts, is likewise exasperated, but resigned to the inevitable: “It is scheduled to be demolished at any time. I expect to wake up one morning and find it disappeared.” He decries the greed of building contractors who wantonly destroy the city’s history, lamenting, “Little is left of the golden age of the city. The Ambron Villa is a universal place and should be protected.” Pointing out that the US Ambassador to Egypt, on a recent visit to composer Sayed Darwish’s house, offered financial support for its renovation, he suggests that only international intervention will save the villa.

Donald the ghost may still haunt the villa, and the crumbling walls are host to other spirits. In the past year, such Alexandrian landmarks as the Elite Restaurant, Brazilian Coffee and Pastroudis have been shut down or are undergoing garish renovation. Unless prompt action is taken to preserve the Ambron Villa, one of the few tangible links to the golden literary age of mid-20th century Alexandria will be lost forever, and the ghosts may be forced into exile.  et