🇪🇷 Eritrea
Asmara
Asmara (ኣስመራ — "They Made Them Unite" in Tigrinya, population 963,000 — the capital of Eritrea and one of the most extraordinary and least visited capitals in Africa) is the city that UNESCO called "a modernist city" and listed as a World Heritage Site in 2017 (the UNESCO citation: "Asmara: a Modernist African City" — the 36th UNESCO World Heritage Site in Africa): an Italian colonial city built between 1935 and 1941 (the Italian colonial period in Eritrea: 1890–1941) by Italian architects (the Fascist regime under Mussolini used Eritrea and the other Italian East African territories as a laboratory for Italian Rationalist and Futurist architecture — the urban design of Asmara was the most ambitious example of Fascist colonial urbanism in the world) in the complete Italian Modernist style (Rationalism, Futurism and Art Deco applied to every building in the city: the Fiat Tagliero garage (the most audacious building in Asmara — the 1938 concrete aircraft-hangar-shaped petrol station with the 30m cantilevered concrete wings that extend without any central supports: the engineer who designed the structure was forced to produce the building at gunpoint by the Italian military commander who threatened to shoot him if the concrete wings collapsed when the scaffolding was removed (they did not collapse)), the Cinema Impero (the 1937 Art Deco cinema), the Bar Vittoria (the 1938 Modernist café with the curved glass facade), and the covered market (the 1937 Rationalist market building with the distinctive arcaded facade)). Eritrea is one of the most closed and isolated countries in the world (the "North Korea of Africa" — the government of President Isaias Afwerki (in power since independence in 1993: the only leader Eritrea has ever had) controls all media, prohibits independent journalism, requires an exit visa for citizens to leave the country and severely restricts tourism): the result is a city almost completely preserved from the 1930s–1940s in aspic — the economic underdevelopment and isolation that have impoverished Eritrea have inadvertently preserved the Italian colonial architecture intact.