This paper examines the reflections of the Italiani d’Egitto (Italians of Egypt) who left Egypt in the 1950/1960s on the subsequent changes in the urban landscapes of Alexandria. Due to changing Egyptian legislation since the 1930s, a combination of restrictive nationalizations on behalf of the Nasser regime (1954-1970) and Italian policies regarding dual citizenship, the majority of the once 70,000 large community of Italians residing in Egypt left en masse between the end of World War II and the 1960s. They describe their repatriation in Italy as a type of exile from the cities they called home for several generations. Today, only about 200 members of these Italian communities remain in Egypt; families that could not afford to repatriate, elderly whose children supported them from elsewhere, and few individuals who managed to maintain businesses despite the politics of the 1950s/1960s. While most literature deals with the history of former foreigner communities in Egypt in terms of a dichotomy situating their nostalgia for a cosmopolitan past in contradistinction to the nationalist movements among an Egyptian majority, I argue that the Italiani d’Egitto’s relationships to the abandoned places of their pasts suggest a socio-historical typology that falls outside of this dichotomy and offers much in the way of addressing questions of historical consciousness in the Eastern Mediterranean. Their articulations of the apartment buildings, shops, streets, beaches, and piazzas of their pasts illuminate aspects of the circumstances that shaped twentieth century Egyptian cities and the experiences of Italians raised “abroad” under the Fascist regime in a country occupied by the British. This paper suggests that the reflections of the Italiani d’Egitto can be read through a juxtaposition of historical and social narratives, letting coherences and dissonances bring out the texture of pasts lived, abandoned, and remembered, and place them in relation to the worlds occupied by today’s inhabitants of those spaces. To do so, the paper presents the experiences and family narratives of Italians from the old communities that remained in Egypt, as well as individuals from Egyptian and other communities in Alexandria involved in historical preservation and confronting the country’s political history, movements increasingly visible since the 2011 revolution wherein a rise in the occupying and destruction of abandoned buildings has been witnessed and the construction on those grounds of massive housing units. This paper is based on archival, ethnographic and oral-historical research conducted from 2011 to 2013 in Egypt and Italy.