Ernesto Verrucci (1874–1945) was born and died at Force in the Marches, and spent the working life between those two dates in Egypt. Sultan — later King — Fuad I appointed him chief architect of the royal charitable works in 1917 and granted him the Ottoman title Bey in 1919, and for the next two decades he was the architect of the Egyptian crown: palaces at Cairo and Alexandria, the mausoleums of the sultan and of the queen mother, the long remodelling of Abdeen Palace between 1919 and 1936, the Haramlik at Montaza, a theatre, a library and a civic museum at Damanhur, the Oriental Music Institute in Cairo. He worked mostly in a heavy revivalist manner that quoted Mamluk and Ottoman Cairo, and his Egyptian corpus is far larger than his Italian reputation.
