Benghazi wears its history in layers: Greek Euesperides under a salt marsh, Roman Berenice beside the Corniche, an Ottoman mosque on a Byzantine church, Italian Rationalist stone, and the scars of 1941 and 2011.
The excavated heart of Hellenistic-Roman Berenice, dug by British archaeologists from 1971: street grids, house walls, mosaic floors, a Byzantine basilica apse and stretches of city wall wedged between the Corniche and the sea.
The original Greek colony founded in the 5th century BCE and abandoned around 250 BCE when its lagoon silted up. A low sandy rise above the sebkha with trench lines, pottery scatter and chamber tombs cut into the rock.
Benghazi's oldest mosque, an Ottoman foundation of the 16th century raised over an earlier Byzantine church, flattened by Allied bombing in 1941 and rebuilt to its old plan. Squat whitewashed minaret, plain prayer hall, deep-set courtyard.
The natural inlet that made Benghazi matter: the Ottoman customs house, warehouse arcades and the stone quay where caravan goods from the Sahara were shipped to Crete and Malta before the Italians rebuilt the harbour.
The twin-domed cathedral of 1929-1939 by Guido Ferrazza and Ottavio Cabiati, once the largest church in North Africa, later used as a mosque and now a shuttered shell. Its scale and neo-Byzantine domes still dominate the seafront skyline.
The Italian civic palace of the 1920s with its arcaded ground floor and clock tower, built as the administrative face of Cyrenaica. The square around it holds the colonial fountain and the city's oldest surviving street lamps.
More than 1,200 Commonwealth burials from the Western Desert campaign, when Benghazi changed hands five times between 1940 and 1942. Rows of Portland headstones, a Cross of Sacrifice and a register listing regiments from Britain, India and South Africa.
The courthouse where lawyers and families of the Abu Salim victims gathered in February 2011, making it the improvised headquarters of the uprising. Its facade and the sea wall beside it still carry revolutionary murals and martyrs' portraits.
Sixty kilometres south, the site where the leader of the Cyrenaican resistance was hanged before 20,000 forcibly assembled Libyans on 16 September 1931. A memorial enclosure marks the gallows ground beside the old concentration camp fields.
The old fishing and trading quarter north of the medina, settled by Cretan and Misratan families, bombed in the Second World War and shelled again in 2014-2017. Rebuilt lanes, courtyard houses and cafes where the older men still tell both stories.
The Hellenistic and Roman cemetery of Berenice, cut into a limestone ridge north of the city: chamber tombs with carved doorframes, loculi shelves for the dead and faint painted plaster surviving in the deeper cuts.
The Italian causeway of the 1930s that carried the coast road across Benghazi's inland lagoon, named for Queen Juliana and still the city's evening promenade. Flamingos work the shallows where the Greek harbour once opened to the sea.