The Cairo Opera House (tel: (02) 2739 0144; website: www.cairoopera.org) is the city's main venue for drama, dance, film and music. It is located in the National Cultural Centre in the Gezira Exhibition Grounds on Gezira Island and is one of seven theatres (one open-air) and concert halls in the complex, offering a busy programme of opera, dance and music across the genres.

There are numerous cultural centres, which have very varied programmes incorporating lectures, films, music, exhibitions and other cultural events. Details are available in the monthly magazine Egypt Today (website: www.egypttoday.com) and in the newspapers Al-Ahram Weekly (website: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly) and The Middle East Times (website: www.metimes.com).

Cairo has a healthy art scene, with numerous galleries spread around the city. To discover what is going on, the Atelier du Caire, 2 Karim al-Dawla (tel: (02) 574 6730), acts as both gallery and a meeting place for artists.

There is no city-wide ticketing organisation. For tourists, the best way to buy tickets is from their hotel concierge or a local travel agency, such as American Express (tel: (02) 570 3411), Misr Travel (tel: (02) 333 0011) or Thomas Cook (tel: (02) 574 3955 or 3776).

Music: Classical performances at cultural centres and at the Cairo Opera House (see above) are more usually of Western classical music, although you can hear classical Arab music as well. You can also hear it at the Arabic Music Institute, 22 Ramsis Street (tel: (02) 574 3373), in performances given by the Umm Kalthoum Classical Arabic Music Troupe.

Theatre: The seven-storey Cairo Opera House (see above) has both international and local performers. There are six indoor theatres and concert halls and an open-air theatre. Visitors should note that in the main hall men must wear a jacket and tie.

Dance: Dance is not a major art form in Cairo, unless you count the folk dance shows that many hotels incorporate as part of the entertainment packages for their guests. Other options range from belly dancing to Sufi dancing. The former can be seen in Las Vegas-style productions at several international hotels including Le Meridien, El Remaya Square-Pyramids (tel: (02) 3777 7070), the Cairo Sheraton, Midan el Galaa in Dokki (tel: (02) 3336 9800), and the Nile Hilton, Midan Tahrir (tel: (02) 2578 0444) and on some of the dinner boats run by the hotels. A cheaper and possibly less cheerful version can be found in several clubs on Al Haram Street. Sufi dancing, more commonly known in the West as the dance of the whirling dervishes, can be seen on Wednesday and Saturday evenings at the Ghouri Caravansary, Sheikh Mohamed Abdu Street, off Sharia Al-Azhar (tel: (02) 909 146).

Film: Cairo was once known as the Hollywood of the Middle East because of the number of Arabic films made here, but no longer, although a new movie studio has been built outside the city. Cinemas tend to show Hollywood blockbusters with Arabic subtitles. Two cinemas that show arthouse films are the Good News Grand Hyatt (two screens) and a two-screen cinema at the Ramses Hilton (tel: (02) 574 7436). The Al-Ahram Weekly website (website: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly) has a good listing of all cinemas, as well as other cultural venues.

Visitors should be prepared for the fact that movie audiences can be as noisy as a sports crowd and that, for security reasons, no-one is allowed to leave the cinema until the film is over.

Others that show English-language films include the Tahrir, 122 Sharia Tahrir in Doqqi (tel: (02) 335 4726), and the Cosmos, 12 Sharia Emad ed-Din (tel: (02) 577 9537).

Literary Notes: There is one towering literary figure in Cairo and that is Naguib Mahfouz, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. His books teem with Cairo life and have been compared to the novels of Dickens and Balzac. The Cairo Trilogy is his masterpiece, acclaimed in Egypt when the three books were first published in 1956 and 1957, and again when finally all three were translated into English in the 1990s. The novels (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street) are a historical family saga set principally in the Islamic quarter of the city, where Mahfouz himself was born in 1911. Other notable works include The Thief and the Dogs (1961), an impressionistic psychological novel that marked a change of style, and Midaq Alley (1947), set in a poor back-street also in the Islamic quarter. His novels show a sympathy for the underdogs of Cairo life, and depict in vivid detail a side of the city that the average visitor will seldom even glimpse.

One of Cairo's leading women writers is Nawal el-Saadawi, who was born just outside Cairo and worked in the city as a doctor and psychiatrist. She founded the Arab Women's Solidarity Association and has written plays, short stories and social studies as well as novels. Her feminist and socialist beliefs pervade her work and she has not always been popular in her own country; she was even imprisoned under the Sadat regime. More recently, she has left Egypt to teach in North American universities. Woman at Point Zero (1979), a novel dealing with the killing of a pimp by a woman who is then condemned to death, has been banned in Egypt, while her most famous book The Hidden Face of Eve (1977) is a non-fiction book dealing with women in the Arab world.

Cairo has always held a particular fascination for British authors and both Olivia Manning (The Levant Trilogy, 1978 onwards) and Penelope Lively (Oleander, Jacaranda, 1994) have used the city as a background for their fiction.