History

Italy occupied the highland settlement in 1889 and, in 1897, Governor Ferdinando Martini made Asmara the capital of the colony of Italian Eritrea. For its first decades the town grew modestly, but everything changed in the mid-1930s. As Italy prepared for and then prosecuted the invasion of Ethiopia, Asmara was recast as a logistical hub and a propaganda capital, and capital and labour poured into a rapid programme of construction.

Between 1935 and 1941 the city’s monumental core took shape. Italian architects and engineers, many of them young and steeped in the debates of European modernism, built cinemas, offices, factories, service stations and apartment blocks at remarkable speed. They worked in the idioms of the moment — the clean geometry of Rationalism, the dynamism of Futurism, the streamlined ornament of Art Deco — adapting them to the light, climate and altitude of the Eritrean plateau. The brevity and intensity of the campaign is precisely what gives Asmara its unusual unity.

The colonial period ended in 1941, when British forces took Eritrea during the Second World War. The city passed through British administration, federation with and then annexation by Ethiopia, a long war of independence, and finally Eritrean independence in 1993. Through all of this its modernist fabric survived largely intact — partly through neglect, partly through care — until in 2017 UNESCO inscribed the historic centre on the World Heritage List, recognising it as an exceptional example of early modernist urbanism applied in an African setting.