Asmara

The aim for this paper is to understand the processes by which Asmarinos appropriated Asmara and the colonial cultural capital. How did it come about and what is the meaning of space in that process?

What unfolds through the paper is a discrepancy between the meta narrative of the fascist city and the local urban experience. Everyday life, social practices, individual strategies for social and economic mobility, and institutional structures within the city perpetuate a different representation of Asmara than that envisioned by Mussolini. Such representation of Asmara is probably closer to the reality of Eritrean life under colonialism. In that sense, appropriation of the settlers’ Asmara and their cultural aesthetics is what birth the Asmarino.

The contribution proposes a overall rereading of the history of the city during the years of Italian occupation highlighting some problematic nodes that make Asmara a unique case. Among these:
- to all intents it can be regarded as an Italian new town following its establishment as the capital of the Eritrean Colony in 1897, but it does not take shape following a predefined design and, conceived in the first two decades of the twentieth century when Eritrea was the “forgotten colony”, it develops distinctive features that remain even in the face of the centralizing intentions of fascism and that survive beyond the end of colonial rule;
- for decades comparable to a small town in the Italian province, in the 1930s it experienced a frenetic development and  it becomes an exceptional case of African "modernist city" and a striking expression of the myth of modernity;
- however, the city concept has little to do with the theories on the Functional City of those years and is rather closer to that of the historic European city, but, unlike this, it hasn’t a formally unified structure and can be seen as a “fragmentary” city;
- it is a racist city that relegates the local population to a sort of informal shantytown on the edge, but whose municipal administration does not so willingly adopt plans and dispositions consequent to the issuing of the racial laws and which, moreover, has been the object of a surprising process of re-appropriation by the Eritrean population. In this way, a peculiar manifestation of the mental outlook of European colonialism in Africa has become a symbol of Eritrean national identity.

The history of the Eritrean capital city doesn't begin in 19th cent., as commonly admitted. Evidences from archaeological excavations prove that the Asmara plateau, particularly the Sämbäl zone, hosted of a proto-urban culture already in early and mid-1st millennium BC. The remnants of Ǝnda Maryam, the 6th-7th cent. Christian church unhappily demolished by the Italians, indicate that Asmara was one of the main East African centers of Late Antiquity. In 14th-15th cent. Gǝ'ǝz hagiographic texts and Latin and Italian notes and itineraries help clarifying the historical picture of the Märäb Mǝllaš territories and the role of the political authority dwelling in the Eritrean capital city.

Asmara è una città italiana fuori dall'Italia che porta i segni del passato coloniale italiano. La 'Piccola Roma', come fu definita nel periodo fascista, è spesso l'ambientazione dei romanzi della scrittrice postcoloniale Erminia Dell'Oro, uno spazio storico, in cui il colonialismo italiano ha realizzato il primo apartheid della storia. Per Erminia Dell'Oro questa città non è soltanto uno spazio reale dove la memoria del passato coloniale riemerge a ogni angolo e riproduce specularmente l'immagine dell'Italia, ma è anche un 'non luogo' che pochi sanno collocare geograficamente, e un luogo ideale in cui è possibile la pacifica coesistenza di culture, lingue e religioni diverse. Altre volte diventa per la scrittrice una città magica, o ancor più, una città immaginaria, quella dei desideri e del ricordo nostalgico che ovatta ogni cosa.

The Fascist war in Ethiopia (1936-1941) is one of the lasts violent attempts a western country undertook to create a colonial empire. Moreover, that conflict had a prominent role in strengthening the axis between Nazism and Fascism that would have brought to the Second World War. As highlighted by a remarkable part of historiography, the greater part of public opinion in the UK, France, and the United States was against the Italian aggression of Ethiopia. However, a not completely negligible part of those public opinions France were sympathetic with Fascist claims over Ethiopia and justified it by addressing a peculiar transimperial discourse operating beyond the national borders of fascist Italy. This paper wants to shed a light on that transimperial discursive space by addressing cultural strategies used to inform non-Italian audiences (namely in United States, in France, and in United Kingdom) about the Ethiopian war, in a time frame between the October 1935 and the May 1936. Thanks to the study of original archival records, the article investigates how some foreign journalists, embedded in the Italian army, described the military conquest of Ethiopia to non-Italian audiences in radio broadcasts from Asmara. By going beyond the boundaries of nation-based colonial culture analysis, this transimperial cultural space straightforwardly addresses the very roots of the process that has built and reinforced the idea of the ‘West’ as bearer of civilization, even on the threshold of the global process of decolonization.

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The core of Asmara, Italy’s former colonial capital in Eritrea, is widely known as a unique repository of 1930s Italian architecture. In addition, its Italian food and other traces of the colonial era lend it the semblance, to foreign eyes, of a still-colonial city. This article describes this apparent colonial inertia with respect to Eritrean citizens’ and government’s interests in sustaining the illusion, and argues that they use their past as Italian colonial subjects – specifically, their postcolonial cultural capital - to fortify their sense of separateness from Ethiopians, and celebrate their independence from their African neighbor.

The ancient city of Asmara is the capital of Eritrea
and its largest settlement. Its beautiful architecture
was rediscovered by outsiders in the early 1990s. In
this book, the authors offer an original analysis of
the colonial city, providing a history not only of the
physical and visible urban reality, but also of a
second, invisible city as it exists in the imagination.
The colonial city becomes a fantastical set of cities
where each one reflects the others as if in a
kaleidoscope.
Architecture in Asmara. Colonial Origin and
Postcolonial Experiences breaks new ground and
moves us a little further along in the attempt to
decipher Asmara in terms of contemporary theory.
This title of the Basics series brings together scholars
from a multiplicity of disciplines who have shown
the ways in which colonial and postcolonial criticism
has served as a platform for new, diversified
readings of Asmara.

This thesis focuses on the building of a colonial monetary system in Eritrea under the rule of Italian colonialism, as well as its impact on local societies and the reasons for the failure of Italian monetary policies. In answering the principal research questions, the “monetary angle” will allow an investigation into other aspects of Italian colonialism in Eritrea, such as the construction of a “colonial knowledge”, the introduction of military wage labour, and the establishment of new financial institutions. Framed against the background of the literature on African monetary history, the thesis is thematically organised into three chapters, each having its own periodisation. The first chapter deals with the construction of a “colonial knowledge” regarding the Eritrean monetary system, and the reasons behind the failure of the Italian attempts to introduce a colonial currency. The second chapter analyses the introduction of military wage labour and the strategies employed by the indigenous veterans to store their wealth. The third chapter discusses the role of banking in Eritrea in supporting Italian attempts to control the monetary system during the First World War currency crisis. At the same time, this chapter sheds light on the manner in which different local actors were affected by these policies, suffered their consequences, or took advantage of the situation. Finally, the third chapter also clarifies the positioning of Eritrea in the regional trade network and the important role of the Maria Theresa thaler in its multiple currency system. The central argument of the study is that the introduction of colonial currencies and the employment of monetary policies did not produce a swift change in local trade networks and economic practices. In fact, the changes were non-linear and were configured as a slow transition that entailed the introduction of different economic and financial devices.