Scafidi Travels asks a question in the title of this film — “Why Is This African City Frozen in the 1930s?” — and the answer unfolds across one of the most unexpected walking experiences on the continent: the Asmara Eritrea walking tour. Asmara is a UNESCO-listed Modernist City, its streetscape of futurist petrol stations, rationalist cinemas, and Italian colonial cafés preserved in a state of remarkable, near-pristine integrity. Most travellers have never heard of it. Those who visit rarely forget it.
About This Walking Tour
Scafidi Travels approaches Asmara with the eye of someone encountering a genuinely extraordinary urban environment for the first time, and the sense of discovery is palpable throughout the video. The walk moves along the main boulevard — Harnet Avenue — past the Art Deco Cinema Impero (1937), the Fiat Tagliero futurist service station with its extraordinary cantilevered concrete wings (designed to look like an aeroplane), and the colonnaded Opera House. These are not minor curiosities but full-scale architectural masterpieces, built with serious ambition by Italian architects working at the height of 1930s Modernism. Scafidi moves through the covered market, the Eritrean Orthodox cathedral, and the Italian-era cafés still serving macchiato in the colonial style. What makes the video particularly valuable is its combination of architectural close-ups with broader street-level filming that shows how the Modernist buildings exist alongside everyday Eritrean street life — vegetable vendors, schoolchildren, priests — rather than as a frozen outdoor museum. This is a living city, and that vitality is the most remarkable thing about it.
Highlights of Asmara Eritrea
The Fiat Tagliero Building (1938), designed by Italian engineer Giuseppe Pettazzi, is arguably the most remarkable single building in Africa: a futurist service station whose two reinforced-concrete wings cantilever twelve metres on each side without any supporting columns. The story that Pettazzi threatened the construction foreman at gunpoint to force removal of the temporary supports may be apocryphal, but the building’s audacity is entirely real. Cinema Impero on Harnet Avenue is a pristine example of Italian Art Deco cinema design, its curved facade and vertical tower element as fresh-looking today as in 1937. The Opera House, the Bar Zilli (one of several surviving Italian-era cafés), and the colonnaded arcades of the main commercial boulevard create a street-level walking experience that has no parallel in Africa. The Medeber Market, where artisans fabricate everything from tin cans to engine parts, represents Asmara’s living craft economy. The highland plateau setting at 2,325 metres ensures a pleasant, mild climate even in the tropical sun.
A Brief History of Asmara Eritrea
Asmara became the capital of Italian Eritrea in 1900, but its defining architectural character was created in a concentrated burst of building activity in the 1930s, when Mussolini’s imperial ambitions for an Italian East African empire (combining Eritrea, Ethiopia after the 1935 invasion, and Somalia) prompted massive investment in showcase colonial infrastructure. Italian architects worked across every strand of contemporary Modernism — rationalism, futurism, expressionism, Art Deco — producing a body of work that, by the late 1930s, had transformed Asmara into one of the most architecturally ambitious planned cities in the world. The defeat of Italian forces in 1941, followed by decades of British administration, Ethiopian annexation (1952–1991), and a thirty-year independence war, meant that Asmara’s 1930s fabric was neither demolished nor extensively modernised. Independence in 1993 and subsequent stability brought UNESCO attention; the “Modernist City of Asmara” was inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 2017, the first site in Eritrea and the first 20th-century planned city in Africa to receive the designation.
Practical Tips
Asmara enjoys a pleasant highland climate year-round at 2,325 metres; October through March is the most comfortable season. The June–September rainy season brings afternoon showers but remains walkable. Asmara International Airport serves the city; the flat highland plateau makes the entire centre very walkable on a single day. A tourist visa is required for most nationalities and should be arranged in advance through an Eritrean embassy. Photography rules are strict — avoid military installations and government buildings and ask permission before photographing people. The Italian café culture is very much alive: Bar Zilli and several other historic cafés still serve excellent espresso in the colonial tradition. This is one of the world’s most unusual and undervisited cities, and the effort of reaching it is amply rewarded.
Watch & Explore More
Discover more of Africa’s remarkable urban heritage with our Addis Ababa Piazza and Merkato walking tour, or browse the complete Africa walking tours collection. Subscribe to @walkingtoursvideoscom on YouTube to explore the world one walking tour at a time.