The Ahmed Shawqi Museum was inaugurated on Tuesday following restoration. Nevine El-Aref attended the official opening The lavish white villa housing the Ahmed Shawqi Museum stands in a small garden on the Giza Corniche on the Nile. Now, after almost a year of restoration work, the museum is again ready to welcome visitors. Salah El-Meligui, the head of the Fine Arts Department at the Ministry of State for Antiquities, says the reopening of the museum coincides almost with the day that Shawqi gained the title of "The Prince of Poets" on 29 April 1927. He went on to say that the museum building had suffered cracks and was in a state of poor preservation. El-Meligui added that a new security system equipped with CCTV cameras had been installed, as had a new ventilation system. The museum is named after the famous Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi. In 1924, after his return to Egypt from exile, Shawqi built this house overlooking the Nile at Giza as his residence. He called it Karma Ibn Hani after the poet Abu Nawwas, the name he had also given to his original home in Matariya. It was in this house that Shawqi met the renowned Egyptian singer/songwriter Mohamed Abdel-Wahab and introduced him for the first time to art. He even offered him a suite at the house. In June 1977, 45 years after his death, Shawqi's house was turned into a museum displaying some of his furniture and his personal belongings, poems and notes. The garden of the museum has a bronze statue by the late Egyptian sculptor Gamal El-Seguini featuring a seated Shawqi dreaming up a new poem. The statue was erected in the garden to mark the 50th anniversary of Shawqi's death. The building itself, which is on two levels, includes Abdel-Wahab's suite which is on the ground floor. It also houses Shawqi's library of 332 books and the handwritten drafts of some of his poems. A music library plays recordings of Abdel-Wahab's sessions with Shawqi. The second floor displays the poet's bedroom and his wife's bedroom, both furnished in early 20th-century elegance. Another room shows more than 713 drafts of Shawqi's poems and photographs of members of his family. Shawqi was a great Egyptian poet and dramatist who led the modern Egyptian literary movement and introduced the concept of poetic epics to the Arabic literary tradition.
