Asmara is a whole modernist city, built in the Eritrean highlands between 1935 and 1941 and never modernised since. Italy put it up in six years and gave its architects a freedom they did not have at home. Then the money ran out. Union with Ethiopia, thirty years of war and a long isolation meant nobody ever had the funds to knock anything down, and while Europe was pulling its own modernist districts apart, this one stayed whole. The building everyone photographs is a petrol station. The Fiat Tagliero, finished in 1938, reaches two concrete wings fifteen metres to a side out over its forecourt from a tower shaped like a cockpit, and not one column stands under them. The city authorities refused to allow it, so Giuseppe Pettazzi built the stone pillars they wanted and then had them knocked away.
The rest of it is not monuments. The modernism is in the ordinary blocks: porticoed pavements, Cubist apartment buildings, banks with Moorish arches, a petrol station shaped like a boat. You can cross the centre in an afternoon, the traffic is thin and the palms throw shade over you the whole way. Cinema Impero opened on Harnet Avenue in 1937 behind a facade of stacked porthole lamps, and it still shows films. The Opera House of 1918 faces the street with a colonnade of Romanesque arches; its foyer is a café, and you drink the macchiato under the arcade. Italian-built steam locomotives still work the top of the line that engineers cut into the escarpment through thirty-odd tunnels and sixty-five bridges, taking you down to Arbaroba and back in about three hours. On the outskirts, thousands of tanks and armoured trucks from those thirty years of war lie stacked in rusting heaps, left standing on purpose as memory. One part of the plan is invisible and still in use. The elegant centre was drawn for Italians only, and Eritreans needed a pass to enter it. The fenced quarter was called the Campo Cintato, and people still call the main avenue Kombishtato — the same words, worn down into Tigrinya.