A year after the Spanish Armada had suffered defeat and shipwreck on the shores of Britain, an anonymous Venetian fulfilled his desire to explore the southern provinces of Egypt. On 7 August 1589 he departed from Cairo with a crew of Nubian boatmen. For some years he had wanted to make that journey ‘for no profit whatsoever, but only to see the many splendid buildings, churches, statues, colossi, obelisks and columns and also to see the place where the above mentioned columns were dug out. In order to look at these excavations I had to journey further than I thought.’

He did not, as he says, travel there for profit; he was neither a pilgrim nor a missionary, and he did not pepper his account with quotations from classical authors like many of his contemporaries. Hardly anything is known of this Venetian except that he could speak Arabic, and had resided in Cairo for some time, though he did not say why he lived there. He did not mention the government, though in 1589 Egypt was ruled by the Turkish viceroy, ‘Uways Pasha, whose palace in the citadel had been sacked in a violent uprising by mutinous soldiers dissatisfied by their rates of pay. This traveller's rather truncated account, written in his native dialect, revealed that he was a practical man who cast an experienced eye over the mixture of building materials and ancient monuments he so carefully measured. The suspicious Mamluk rulers had always frowned on the Franks who struck off on their own, away from prescribed routes, and the Turks followed their example. So perhaps the Venetian who had lived in Cairo for many years was trusted by the authorities, who put no obstacles in his way.

Before setting off, he had been warned by well-meaning friends about the unknown dangers he could encounter and that he might not even return alive. But overcome by his great desire to see the rumoured splendours of Luxor and Karnak and the quarries where the obelisks were extracted, he brushed all their objections aside. On his return he belittled the sufferings and tribulations of the journey, caused by both the great heat and the lack of food, sometimes not having even an onion to eat, one of the staple foods of the local population.