
Asmara is one of Eritrea’s oldest cities, designed by the Italians. The city’s foundations are thought to have been laid 700 years ago. It became a testing ground for architects interested in medieval designs.
The result is thousands of buildings built in distinct styles such as Futurist, Novocento, Rationalist, and Art Deco as part of the grand city plan that included boulevards and wide sidewalks, according to the World Monuments Fund.
A large number of the structures were built between 1935 and 1941, when Asmara was the main city of Italian dictator Mussolini’s empire in Africa.
The city grew to become a sizable town by the 1920s after becoming the capital of the Italian colony in the late nineteenth century. Many Italians moved to the region in the 1930s in preparation for Mussolini’s planned invasion of Ethiopia.
Historians are correct when they say Asmara is an Italian-built colonial city. However, the residents have an interesting history of the Eritrean capital that they cherish. Asmara is thought to be made up of four clans on the Kebessa Plateau: the Gheza Gurtom, the Gheza Shelele, the Gheza Serenser, and the Gheza Asmae.
According to oral tradition, the women of the region that would become Asmara advised the four clans to band together and fight the enemy who was waging war against them. Arbaete Asmara became the new name for the area where the four united clans lived. According to asmera.nl, Arbaete Asmara literally means “the four are united” in Tigrinya. Arbaete was eventually dropped, and the area became known as Asmara. According to another local legend, the Queen of Sheba gave birth to a son, Menelik I, in Asmara.