Church of Our Lady of the Rosary: Asmara’s “cathedral” that hasn’t technically been one since 1995

In Asmara, capital of Eritrea, the Church of the Blessed Virgin of the Rosary was built by the Italian colonial authorities for the fast-growing community of Italian settlers. It served as the principal church of the apostolic vicariate of Eritrea. Work began in June 1921 and was completed in September 1923, with the consecration on 14 October of the same year. The design was by the Milanese architect Oreste Scanavini, with the works directed by Mario Mazzetti, of Montese, in the province of Modena. Lombard Romanesque Revival in style, the church has a nave with two side aisles, a transept and three apses, measuring about 40 metres in length, 27 in width and 25 metres in height up to the lantern, which is crowned by a bronze statue commonly identified as the archangel Gabriel, although some sources suggest it may be Michael. The bell tower, about 52 metres tall, was completed according to Wikipedia in 1925, though other sources give 1928, a discrepancy that remains unresolved. According to some tourist sources not cross-checked against primary ones, the eight bells that form an octave were cast from the bronze of Austro-Hungarian cannon captured in the First World War, the largest weighing 3.8 tonnes. An isolated source attributes the altarpiece of the high altar, showing the Assumption of Mary, to the painter Carlo Maratta (1625-1713), and describes it as a gift of King Victor Emmanuel III, a suggestive claim but unverified elsewhere, to be treated with caution. Asmara was nicknamed «Little Rome» during the Italian colonial building boom of the thirties, which led to the inscription of the city on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2017 as «Asmara: a Modernist African City». The church, which precedes that modernist period (1935-1941) by more than a decade, falls within it as a pre-existing historic building inside the protected urban fabric, without any specific mention in the text of the UNESCO decision, which could not be consulted directly during this research. It was the principal church of the apostolic vicariate of Eritrea from 1923. On 21 December 1995, with the reorganisation of the ecclesiastical circumscription, the status of cathedral passed to the Kidane Mehret Cathedral, of Ethiopian rite, while this building is today technically a parish church of the Eritrean Catholic archeparchy of Asmara, though the inhabitants still commonly call it «the cathedral». The archeparchy was raised from eparchy to metropolitan archeparchy by Pope Francis in January 2015. No pope has ever visited Eritrea.