Asmara: A Modernist African City
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How it came to be
Asmara, on a plateau more than 2,000 m above sea level, was a small village in the 19th century. After Italy occupied it in 1889, it grew as a military outpost of the colonial power, and in 1897 Governor Ferdinando Martini made it the capital of Italian Eritrea.
After 1935 a large building programme applied Italian rationalism to government offices, housing, shops, churches, mosques, synagogues, cinemas and hotels, and most of the centre was built between 1935 and 1941. The Cinema Impero opened in 1937, and in 1938 the Fiat Tagliero service station by engineer Giuseppe Pettazzi was completed with two 15 m cantilevered concrete wings. The 1939 census counted 98,000 inhabitants, 53,000 of them Italian.
The property covers the city built under several phases of planning between 1893 and 1941, along with the unplanned indigenous neighbourhoods of Arbate Asmera and Abbashawel. Asmara came through the 1961–1991 war of independence largely undamaged and became Eritrea's capital again after independence. It was inscribed in July 2017.
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