Standing beneath Pettazzi's cantilever wings at the Tagliero station, you grasp why UNESCO inscribed Asmara in 2017. Thirty meters of unsupported concrete — Futurist engineering at its most uncompromising. A modernist laboratory on the Eritrean plateau.
A City Built as Manifesto
Between 1935 and 1941, Italian architects in Asmara were afforded creative latitude impossible in Italy. Rava married Rationalist geometry with highland stone. Sclafani's Cinema Impero joined Art Deco grandeur to modernist restraint. Each commission pushed European architecture past what the metropole would allow.
“Asmara is the most complete expression of Italian Rationalist urbanism — where modernism reached conclusions politically impossible in Italy.”
Professor Zeresenay Mehari, Asmara Heritage Project