Asmara holds Africa's densest concentration of 1930s Italian Rationalist architecture alongside a living Tigrinya art scene. Three days of decaying picture palaces, national museum antiquities, Orthodox mural painting and Sunday-night theatre at the Opera House.
Two lesser-known 1937 picture palaces on Serawit Street. Cinema Roma keeps its travertine facade, original velvet seats and a working 35mm projection booth; Cinema Dante is now a bar with intact Art Deco plasterwork. Entry to the foyers is free; screenings 20 Nakfa.
A small commercial gallery showing contemporary Eritrean painters working in the post-independence idiom — Michael Adonai's elongated figures, watercolours of the Massawa ruins, and charcoal studies of the Fenkil campaign. Canvases run 1,500-9,000 Nakfa.
The 1928 Fascist party headquarters by Carlo Marchi, with a crenellated Lombard tower, arcaded loggia and the chiselled-out remains of the fasces relief above the door. The exterior is the most legible piece of Italian propaganda architecture left standing in Asmara.
Late-afternoon light on two Rationalist set pieces: the streamlined 1937 Shell service station on Denden Street with its curved marquee, and the neoclassical 1897 Governor's Palace, damaged in the liberation war and still awaiting restoration.
Housed in the former Governor's residence above the city. Aksumite pottery, the pre-Aksumite Sabaean inscriptions from Qohaito, Ottoman-era Dahlak tombstones and an ethnographic hall covering all nine Eritrean nationalities' dress and instruments.
A 1930s espresso bar with the original Faema machine, marble counter and mirrored back bar. The macchiato costs 8 Nakfa and comes in a glass; the sfogliatelle and cannoli are made in-house daily by bakers trained in the Italian tradition.
The 1920 theatre by Odoardo Cavagnari, with a Renaissance-revival portico, painted ceiling and 800 velvet seats. Home to the Eritrean National Theatre company, which stages Tigrinya-language drama and the guayla dance troupes.
The Italian community club hosts live krar lyre and wata fiddle sessions in its garden courtyard several evenings a week. Eritrean jazz players who came up through the 1970s Asmara Band scene still sit in, playing Tigrinya standards.
The 1938 mosque by Guido Ferrazza fuses Rationalist massing with a Roman-column-and-Islamic-arch portico. Behind it, the Medeber market is a recycling workshop city where smiths beat oil drums into stoves and coffee pots, working entirely by hand.
Rows of hand-coiled agelgil baskets, netsela shawls with woven tibeb borders, and the white cotton zuria dresses worn at Orthodox festivals. Prices are unmarked; a good netsela runs 600-1,200 Nakfa depending on the density of the border weave.
The Orthodox cathedral compound holds illuminated Ge'ez parchment gospels and painted wooden icons in the traditional Ethiopian-Eritrean style — flat-planed saints with wide eyes, made with pigments ground from local ochre and indigo.
Founded by Luigi Melotti in 1939 and still brewing under state ownership. The shaded garden serves draught Asmara beer at 15 Nakfa and mies honey wine in flasks, and is where Asmarinos gather for the long evening passeggiata wind-down.