Asmara is the capital of Eritrea, a city of 2,300 metres in the highlands where the Italians built an entire modernist city between 1935 and 1941 in the six years of their empire, and it was never modernised, preserved by war and isolation rather than planning, so that it stands as the most complete Art Deco and futurist townscape on Earth, walked in an afternoon along its palm-lined avenues. Mussolini's architects treated the city as a drawing board, and the results are still in use: the Fiat Tagliero service station of 1938, whose two concrete wings fifteen metres to a side reach out over the forecourt from a tower shaped like a cockpit with not one column beneath them, after the architect Pettazzi is said to have threatened the builders with a pistol to make them remove the props; the Cinema Impero of 1937 on Harnet Avenue, behind a facade of stacked porthole lamps, one of the finest Deco cinemas left standing and still showing films; the Opera House of 1918 with its colonnade of Romanesque arches, where the macchiato is drunk on the steps. The elegant centre was drawn for Italians only, with a fence of law that kept the Eritreans in their own quarter, a line that can no longer be seen but shaped the city.
The modernism is not only in the monuments but in the ordinary blocks, the villas, bars and cinemas of the whole centre, listed by UNESCO in 2017, and the city's cafés keep the Italian habit of the evening walk and the espresso. Italian-built steam locomotives, some of them articulated Mallets, still work the top of the railway that engineers cut into the escarpment through thirty-odd tunnels and sixty-five bridges, running down to Arbaroba on excursion days, and on the outskirts lies one of the largest scrapyards of war machinery anywhere, hundreds of tanks and armoured trucks from thirty years of fighting stacked in rusting heaps. In September the plateau comes up yellow with the Meskel daisy. Asmara is a city that time skipped, and the skipping is what saved it.