Letter from Asmara.

Despite decades of internal strife in the surrounding countryside, the Eritrean capital of Asmara still maintains strong architectural and cultural connnections with its Italian colonial past.

I clearly remember my astonishment when I first landed in Asmara in 1991, the first year of peace for Eritrea which, for over 30 years, had been fighting for its independence. I remember it well, because I would see it on the face of everyone who arrived at this unique and amazing city. The airport taxi was an ancient, shiny, rusty-blue Fiat 1100. (In Italy we hadn't seen one for at least 30 years.) The obliging taxi-driver halted in front of a corner cafe. 'Bar Duca d'Aosta', the sign announced. In Italian, I ordered a cappuccino and a bun. In Italian, the barman said 'Welcome'. Surely I was dreaming.

The Fiat continued its trip into the city centre, skidding towards a petrol station which looked like an aeroplane taking off. 'Fiat -- Officine Tagliero', was inscribed in red lettering high over the central tower. It was the former branch office of Italy's largest car manufacturer, a truly astonishing building erected in 1939. Somebody told me that on the day before its inauguration, the designer had to put a gun to the builder's head. The builder was incredulous; he couldn't believe that once the wooden pillars were removed, the 'wings' would stay up. Nobody had ever seen such a daring building in the whole of Africa.

That evening I found myself strolling up and down the city's main avenue and discovered the Asmara passeggiata. Old men wearing stiff grey cloth hats, broad-striped shirts, waistcoats and bulky ties under three button pin-striped suits were slowly strolling among the palm trees. Women wrapped up in white shawls were walking more quickly and talking animatedly. This passeggiata filled up the hours before sunset. I also discovered the Cinema Impero with its clean, geometric lines and porthole windows. (During Ethiopian domination, an attempt was made to rename it Cinema Ethiopia, but once the Eritrean people were free again, they inscribed, in white lettering over the purple frontage, its original colonial name.) Further revelations included the tall towers of the Orthodox church of Nda Mariam, the Rationalist villas of the Villini district and the white marble Great Mosque, a 1938 project by Guido Ferrazza, a famous Italian colonial architect.

I spent my first night in Asmara in the tennis-court sized room of the Hotel Hamasien, built in an almost Nordic style in 1919. My bed linen still boasted the golden embroidery of 'Ciaao' (Compagnia Italiana Alberghi Africa Orientale). I was sure now. This was Asmara, and it was, as the partisans of Eritrean independence (whom I had met when they were a resistance force in the mountains) had described it to me for years. Asmara, city of the sun, luminous, and Mediterranean, In the middle of Africa.

Asmara is planned for its people, for their commerce, for their life and needs, for meeting each other and taking it easy. It was as if the lost-paradise climate had infected and inspired generations of Italian architects and town planners. Away from the imperial rigidities of Fascism, they built, with great enthusiasm and passion, this remarkable town on a 2000m high plateau on the edge of the Red Sea. Naigzy Gebremedhin, architect and director of the Eritrean government's heritage programme, has no doubts: 'Asmara is a virtual museum of Italian Art Deco. And the Asmarinos love their town. They have always wanted to preserve the Italian colonial architecture, and they still do. They know their town is beautiful and pleasant, built for the good life. We are not going to destroy it, as colonial masterpieces have been destroyed elsewhere.'

Asmara is essentially a place of details, of light and shade, of curves and lines. No one building stands out from the others. The city's soul is revealed in the coloured majolica, in the unusual reflections of Art Nouveau glass windows, in the fading tesseras of a mosaic that suddenly appears behind a house corner, in the colourful tiles of a fountain, in the stone statues holding up a small balcony, in the wroughtiron balustrade of a gate, in the elegant entrance to a brewery.

Asmara's urban landscape is thrilling. Although its name has changed several times, the marvels of the Viale della Liberazione left me speechless. (Originally named after Mussolini by the Italian Fascists, it was then changed to the Negus Haile Selassie during the years of the Ethiopian Empire, and then again after the Revolution during the dark times of the tyrannical Mengistu Haile Maryam, the 'red' dictator of Ethiopia.) Here a shell-shaped fountain divides the two flights of stairs leading to the sumptuous entrances of the Asmara Theatre, frescoed with veiled Art Nouveau ballerinas. A tower, as tall as the Alexandria lighthouse, unbalances the Cubist geometry of the Ministry for Education building, an old Casa di Fascio built in 1928. Asmara town hall, built between 1951 and 1957 to a 1930s design is a puzzle worthy of the most daring Cubist genius with a facade of green majolica mosaic.

Asmara has innumerable film houses (the 1930s Italians must have loved the cinema) housing audiences of thousands. The Cinema Impero, the Odeon, the Capital, the Roma, the Africa; all are still there, with their elongated windows and glass towers. And the cafes; Southern Italians spend long days in cafes, so why deny such pleasures in Africa? The hours slide pleasantly by at the Bar Alba (whose glorious fittings were unfortunately destroyed last year), at the Bar Commercio, Bar Tre Stelle, Bar Vittoria, Pasticceria Giardino and Bar Diana.

Yet Asmara's miracle almost came to an end during recent years. Eritrea's Declaration of Independence dates from 1993, after a long and bloody war with Ethiopia which began in 1961. Since 1998, however, a new conflict (again with Ethiopia) has convulsed the country, destabilising Eritrea's reconstruction. A fragile peace between the two sides was signed only in June of this year. Asmara has become the mirror of all the country's anxieties and pain, of its people's weariness.

But, in the middle of this tragedy, Eritrea has found the strength not to forget its Queen of Cities. The World Bank has allocated half a million dollars to carry forward a census of Italian Art Deco lost in Africa.

Asmara has always managed to escape from the tragedies surrounding it. The Italians surrendered to the English in 1941 without fighting for the streets of the Eritrean capital. The soldiers of Mengistu's Ethiopia left without resisting the Eritrean partisans, who arrived in a riotous, celebratory procession in 1991 to their newly-liberated city. The latest Ethiopian offensive stopped at the ramparts of the western borders of the plateau and the bombs from Addis Ababa's planes threatened the airport, but exploded far from Asmara's houses. The Eritrean capital still, in these difficult times, faces a challenge: how to remain itself, a humanly-scaled city, a city of shops and houses, a city for the passeggiata and time regained, without remaining motionless?

Asmara has no wish to become an improbable perfect city or museum. It refuses to become a place paralysed by the memories of a splendid lost architecture. Asmara, the African city, wants to live, wants to respond to the rhythms of its everyday life, in war as well as in peace. In the morning, legions of women street-sweepers painstakingly clean every corner of the city. With graceful gestures, the gardeners carefully water the purple-blossomed bougainvillaea. Jacarandas fill every street with a carpet of sky-blue petals and cars are still kept out of the centre. Asmara is as obstinate as its inhabitants. It doesn't want to betray its beauty and its sweetness. But it also doesn't want to deny its problems and its troubles. Asmara wants to live, well aware that it has (and must defend) those vital balances that have been lost elsewhere.