Asmara: The Little Rome of the Highlands.
Avant-garde Africa.
Art Deco Cities Series — Maison Philippe Montagne
There is a city at over two thousand metres above sea level, on a plateau in the Horn of Africa, where the light falls in a particular thin, high-altitude clarity, and where an entire generation of young Italian architects — most of them barely out of school, most of them working with almost no oversight and almost no precedent — built one of the densest concentrations of Art Deco and modernist architecture found anywhere on earth.
The city is Asmara, capital of Eritrea, and if the name feels unfamiliar in this context, that is precisely the point of telling its story.
How Art Deco Arrived, and With Whom
Eritrea became Italy's first colony in 1890, and Asmara — then little more than a cluster of villages known locally as Arbate Asmera, the Four Asmeras — was declared its capital in 1897. For its first decades under Italian administration, the city grew modestly, in the architectural vocabulary of the period: Romanesque revival, neoclassicism, the kind of comfortable European borrowing one might expect from any colonial outpost of the era. The Asmara Theatre, designed in 1918 by the engineer Odoardo Cavagnari, belongs to this earlier, more cautious moment — elegant, competent, unremarkable by the standards of what was still to come.
Everything changed after 1935, when Mussolini's Italy, preparing for and then celebrating its invasion of Ethiopia, poured extraordinary resources into Eritrea as a staging ground and a showcase. Asmara became, almost overnight, a laboratory. The young architects sent there — many fresh from Italian schools of architecture, energised by Futurism, Rationalism, and the confident geometries of Novecento — found something rare: a city with no entrenched planning bureaucracy, no conservative client base demanding historical pastiche, and an unlimited appetite from Rome for buildings that would announce imperial modernity to the world. Between 1935 and 1941, in a construction campaign of barely six years, thousands of new buildings rose across the city. One architectural historian has described the result simply: a place where avant-garde buildings sit directly beside reactionary ones, sometimes in open symbiosis. Asmara did not choose a single style. It absorbed all of them, at once, at extraordinary speed.
The city earned its nickname during this period — La Piccola Roma, Little Rome — not for any resemblance to the Eternal City's classical monuments, but for the confidence and completeness of its urban vision: broad tree-lined boulevards, cafés, cinemas, a rational grid, an entire European-scaled metropolis assembled on a highland plateau in the space of half a decade.
The music arrived alongside the buildings, though its story runs on its own clock. Piano bars opened in Asmara during the Italian period and, by the 1960s, had become something else entirely — hybrid rooms where jazz improvisation met Eritrean folk rhythm, where the kebero drum sat beside a Western piano, where a wave of American jazz and blues broadcast from the United States' Kagnew Station exposed a generation of young Asmarinos to entirely new harmonic language. Eritrean musicians began experimenting with brass and saxophone, instruments absent from traditional ensembles, and by the following decade many of them — the guitarist Tewolde Redda among them — had migrated south to Addis Ababa, drawn by opportunity, where they became part of the same golden-era scene that produced Ethio-jazz and figures like Mulatu Astatke. The two cities, Asmara and Addis Ababa, sang across a shared border for a generation, each shaping the other's sound, before politics eventually cut the line.
The Grand Landmarks
Begin, as most visitors do, at the Cinema Impero — completed in 1937, designed by Mario Messina, and considered by architectural historians among the finest examples of Art Deco cinema architecture anywhere in the world. Its scale alone commands attention: originally built to seat eighteen hundred people, its façade a disciplined arrangement of vertical fins and bold Deco lettering, it remains, even in its more modest present incarnation, a building that fills to capacity for a football match relayed on a screen, exactly as it once filled for the great pictures of its era.
Nearby stands the Governor's Palace — known locally as the Gibi — whose current form dates to the 1930s reconstruction of Ferdinando Martini's original 1897 building, now serving as the seat of the Eritrean presidency. 
And a short walk from the city centre, the Fiat Tagliero Building, completed in 1938 by the architect Giuseppe Pettazzi, remains the single most photographed structure in Eritrea: a former petrol station whose vast cantilevered concrete wings, spanning some fifteen metres on either side with no visible means of support, were shaped deliberately to evoke an aeroplane in the instant before takeoff. It belongs, strictly, to Futurism rather than Art Deco proper — but the two languages were never cleanly separated in Asmara, and the Tagliero building's audacity captures something essential about the entire city's spirit: architecture conceived not as shelter, but as a declaration of velocity, modernity, and nerve.
The Everyday Deco
What distinguishes Asmara from almost any other Art Deco city, though, is not its handful of grand set-pieces but the astonishing density of its ordinary architecture. This was never a style reserved for cinemas and government palaces. It saturated the fabric of daily life. Bar Zilli, built in 1930 on Sematat Street and still serving coffee and food today, wears its Deco geometry with the same conviction as any monumental building in the city centre — a neighbourhood café as architectural statement. The little Agip petrol station of 1937, still standing though now operating under a different flag, applied the same rigorous streamlined logic to fuel pumps that Pettazzi had applied, more theatrically, at the Tagliero station down the road. Barbershops, market stalls at the vast Medebar market, apartment blocks the colour of sand and rose and pale ochre — the whole city, in effect, was rendered in a single consistent architectural grammar, whether the building in question was destined for a governor or a mechanic.
This is, in its way, the most instructive part of Asmara's story. Art Deco elsewhere in the world is often remembered through its most spectacular monuments — a skyscraper, a grand hotel, a single iconic cinema. Asmara demonstrates something different: that the style, once it took hold of a place completely, was democratic in its application. It did not distinguish between the palace and the petrol pump. Geometry, once embraced as a civic language, spoke to everyone.
A Grammar Without Borders
Asmara's Art Deco is a complicated inheritance — it arrived by way of colonial ambition, built by an occupying power on land that was not its own, and any honest telling of the city's beauty must hold that history alongside the admiration. But the architecture itself, improbably, survived the political story that produced it. Decades of war left Eritrea's cities scarred; Asmara's Deco fabric, protected largely by circumstance and later by deliberate preservation, remained standing, and in 2017 the city was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List — one of the very few instances of an entire modernist urban centre being protected in its near-totality.
What Asmara ultimately proves is something the pursuit of beauty has always suspected: that a grammar of bold geometry, streamlined form, and disciplined ornament, once released into the world, recognises no particular homeland. It found Paris in the 1920s and a highland plateau in the Horn of Africa a decade later, with equal fluency. It appears wherever ambition, material, and a moment of historical opportunity happen to converge — in a Manhattan tower, in a Mesopotamian ziggurat's afterglow, in a petrol station shaped like an aeroplane on a street in Asmara. Art Deco, in the end, was never a Parisian style that travelled outward. It was a grammar the whole world seemed, at roughly the same moment, ready to speak.
Sources
Denison, Edward & Ren, Guang Yu. Asmara: Africa's Secret Modernist City. Merrell, London, 2003.
Apollo Magazine. "From Cinemas to Service Stations: The Modernist Marvels of Eritrea." apollo-magazine.com, 2019.
UNESCO World Heritage Centre. "Asmara: A Modernist African City." whc.unesco.org, 2017.
Afropop Worldwide. "Tewolde Redda: Eritrea's Guitar Pioneer, Singles 1970–73." afropop.org
Further Reading
The Grammar of Gold: Art Deco and Its Mesopotamian Soul