BRICK BY BRICK

ASMARA: THE CITY THAT REMADE ITS SHADOW

KAMAU FALDONE

May 12, 2025

Art Deco cinemas, Futurist gas stations, Rationalist cafés—Asmara, Eritrea, is a city of modernist dreams cast in concrete. Built by Italian colonizers to mirror Rome, it now bears the weight of another history. These buildings were meant to dominate; instead, they’ve been quietly repurposed. Here, geometry meets dust, and beauty endures not through preservation, but through use. Asmara is no ruin—it’s a living archive of adaptation, resilience, and light.

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Some cities arrive fully formed. Others never arrive at all. Asmara, when I first saw it, felt like a city left behind by time—except it hadn’t been left behind. It had simply continued, softly, almost in secret.

I landed at dawn. The light on the tarmac had that particular highland clarity—hard-edged, metallic, and somehow dry. By the time I reached the city, the rooftops were already catching fire with the sun. Dust moved through the streets like memory—unnoticed until it was everywhere.

There are places that insist on being seen, but Asmara doesn’t. It hums, like something electric under concrete. Not a ruin, not quite preserved, more like a dream someone forgot to wake up from.

The geometry is the first thing you notice: cinemas shaped like radios, gas stations like spaceships, villas drawn with a ruler’s edge. In Asmara, the past has angles. These buildings were supposed to signify power—monuments to a fascist empire’s fantasy. But the fantasy cracked, and the buildings stayed. They were repurposed in a kind of accidental resilience.

Cinema Imperio

The Italians didn’t build for Eritrea. They built for themselves. Between 1935 and 1941, they poured modernist ambition into the highlands—Rationalist post offices, Deco cafés, Futurist garages, all arranged like a stage set for a colonial opera. Then the war came, and the curtain fell.

Cinema Roma is still there. The awning curves out confidently over the street, like it always expected a crowd. Inside, the terrazzo still shines in patches. But there is no projector, no ushers. Just light, and pigeons, and the aftertaste of something grand and foolish.

For years, Asmara felt like a set left standing after the film wrapped. Even the cars seemed to be waiting for a director to yell “cut!” One morning I saw a rusted Fiat 500 lodged against a crumbling curb—tires deflated, windshield woven with leaves. No one had moved it. That would’ve broken the spell. But this isn’t nostalgia. I’ve seen nostalgia. This is something else, namely a city that outlived its founding logic and didn’t bother to announce it.

Governor’s Palace

After the Italians fell, the British moved in. Then came federation with Ethiopia, then annexation, then war. Thirty years of it. Yet the buildings endured—not because anyone preserved them, but because people kept using them. There was no money for restoration, no mood for heritage. Function eclipsed ideology.

Viale Italia, a boulevard meant for parades, now hosts fruit vendors and sputtering minibuses. That’s Asmara’s secret. It wasn’t frozen, it just kept going.

I spent a morning in a tailor’s shop tucked inside a former Fiat service station from 1938. The walls still curved like a speedway, still bore the bones of acceleration. But inside: sewing machines, plastic chairs, a television murmuring from the corner. A building built for speed now slowed to a stitch. 

City plan

That’s what you begin to understand if you stay long enough. The architecture is not the story. The use is. People live inside these contradictions. And they live well. They hang laundry from Deco balconies. They drink espresso under fascist facades. They fix motorcycles where military banners once unfurled.

There’s a danger in admiring cities like this, namely a danger of aestheticizing what was once violence. But Asmara won’t let you do that. It interrupts you. It makes you notice the child chasing chickens through a Rationalist courtyard. A grandmother buying bread beside a gleaming marble column. A boy in a Barcelona jersey eating his breakfast on the fountain edge in what was once a colonial plaza.

Every morning, there’s a bread line behind the old facades. Not out of desperation, just because the bread is still baked fresh in wood-fired ovens. The women balance baskets as they’ve done forever. The diesel hums. The light flattens everything.

Vittorio Bar

UNESCO named the city a World Heritage Site in 2017. A small miracle. It was the first time anyone officially said what locals already knew: that this place, improbably, was whole. That a colonial blueprint could become a living form. That history, metabolized slowly enough, might become home.

Of course, the recognition came late. And recognition doesn’t guarantee care. There are cracks now—deep ones. Asmara exists in a suspended state. Preservation costs money. Tourism is rare. Eritrea remains politically closed. Every year, the future gets hungrier.

But for now, the neon letters on the Cinema Impero still flicker red. For now, the Deco villas are full of people, not ghosts. For now, the sewing machines still hum inside what used to be petrol stations. 

Construction drawing for Café Olimpico

It’s easy to believe that cities are made by architects. Asmara taught me otherwise. Cities are made by use, by refusal, by staying.

To admire Asmara’s buildings is to recognize their strangeness. They were meant to dominate, but they’ve been domesticated. The power was in the hard-edged line; now it’s in the living. And maybe that’s the real reversal: the fascist dream repurposed for errands, espresso, and the school run.

Pista da Bowling

At the edge of town, the buildings grow skeletal again. Half-built concrete blocks. Wire hanging like ivy. A country paused mid-sentence. But still, the golden light comes. Still, the children shout. Still, the cafés open. Asmara doesn’t shine. It glows.

Kamau Faldone (born 1997 in Nakuru, Kenya) studied architectural history in Cape Town and Lisbon. He writes about colonial leftovers, half-finished utopias, and the quiet lives of buildings long after their headlines fade. His essays have appeared in journals, obscure footnotes, and once, accidentally, on a tourist brochure. He lives in Nairobi with too many books and old, dusty blueprints.

Cover image: Fiat Tagliero building