Asmara is a whole Art Deco city, thrown up in six years and then left almost untouched for eighty. Between 1935 and 1941 Italy's colonial regime built itself a modern capital 2,325 metres up on the Eritrean plateau, and the Futurist and Rationalist architects it sent drew things here that no client back home would have approved. Giuseppe Pettazzi's Fiat Tagliero service station throws two 15-metre concrete wings out over its forecourt with nothing underneath holding them up. Cinema Impero opened in 1937 behind a facade of ranked porthole lamps; the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Rosary went up in brick and Lombard arches. Then the money stopped. Federation with Ethiopia, a thirty-year war of independence and decades of isolation left nobody with the means to knock any of it down, so where Europe cleared away its own modernist quarters, Asmara kept hers. UNESCO inscribed the 480-hectare centre whole in 2017 — the first modernist city listed in its entirety.
The pleasure of the place is walking, and in the evening the whole city does it, drifting up and down palm-lined Harnet Avenue past espresso bars older than the republic. Fiats from the 1960s, kept alive without spare parts, wait at the taxi ranks. The buildings are preserved rather than restored — ochre paint chalking off, laundry hung across Rationalist balconies. Rain comes with the kremti storms of June to September, and as they pull back the plateau turns yellow with daisies. Reaching it is the hard part: Eritrea is among the least-visited countries on earth, foreigners need a permit to go more than 25 kilometres beyond the city, and pointing a camera at anything official is illegal. The railway down the escarpment to the Red Sea no longer runs as a through service — its Italian steam engines now haul chartered visitors only as far as Arbaroba.