The Fiat Tagliero station, an ambivalent symbol of Italian colonial architecture

Asmara is a bittersweet myth in the Italian imagination. The foremost example of rationalist modernist architecture in East Africa – recognized as such by UNESCO, which added it to the World Heritage list in 2017 – the Eritrean capital continues to radiate a nostalgic effect that, more than eighty years after the fall of the fascist regime and about fifty years after the exodus of the Italian community, has now taken on blurred outlines. A transposition of fascist urban ideals, Asmara’s urban fabric is characterized by an exceptional architectural cohesion, punctuated by landmarks such as churches, cinemas, bars, and former headquarters of companies from the Bel Paese. For Italians, the sense of familiarity can be disorienting, both because of their habitual exposure to the language of rationalism and because of the postcard-like image, suspended in time and cloaked in presumed benevolence, that this stage-set city seems to emanate.

With the departure of Italians in 1974 following the Marxist revolution of the Ethiopian Derg military council, the spaces in the city center were occupied by Eritreans, who began inhabiting them without radically altering them, in a sort of fluid continuity. Bars, pharmacies, and schools are still there, evoking in the rare visitors who venture to Asmara, as photographer Daniele Ratti told us, the sensation of finding themselves in the early 1960s. An architect by training, Ratti has traveled to Eritrea on several occasions, with the aim of documenting this vast heritage now threatened by neglect and, above all, by the lack of funds allocated to restoration. “Imagine a city where 80% is made up of rationalist architecture, while the remaining 20% was built between the 1960s and 1980s. The heritage is so immense that you could publish countless books just on Asmara. For example, in the villa district there are buildings of great value, each different from the next. Then there are structures outside the norm, simply unique. And among these is the Fiat Tagliero. It was the first major building I saw in Asmara, and it remained my first love,” Ratti commented.

Daniele Ratti

The Fiat Tagliero project is the story of an architectural avant-garde which, taking shape outside the borders of the Italian peninsula, found the possibility to experiment with greater autonomy, escaping the more traditionalist criteria prevailing in Italy. The building – a Fiat service station – was designed by Giuseppe Pettazzi and inaugurated in 1938. The architect was inspired by the form of an airplane, under the impulse, as Ratti recounted, of the Manifesto dell’Architettura Aerea (Manifesto of Aerial Architecture) that futurist architect Angiolo Mazzoni published in 1934 together with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Mino Somenzi. The structure stands out for its central tower, which housed a shop and an office, from which two fifteen-meter cantilevered canopies extend, made of concrete and shaped with the aerodynamic lines of an aircraft. It was precisely these wing-canopies that earned it the nickname “airplane”, and they were also at the center of the exhilarating story of the workshop’s inauguration.

According to the laws in force at the time, the canopies should have been supported by pillars. Pettazzi, who had conceived them as self-supporting, used only removable pillars during construction and demanded that they be eliminated before the inauguration. When the workers refused, the story goes, Pettazzi pulled out a pistol, threatening to use it if they did not obey. An extreme gesture, yet one that seems to have triumphed over the challenge of statics and the challenge of time. Nearly a century later, the wings are still there, without any columns to support them.

Jermay Michael Gabriel

The station would remain in operation until 1974, when Giovanni Tagliero, director of the local Fiat plant, returned to Italy. Restored in 2003, it no longer functions as a gas station but is experienced by the local population as one of the undisputed symbols of their city. Daniele Ratti’s photographs first of all highlight the volumetric qualities of the construction, telling the story of how the overlapping of lines and curves helps convey the aerodynamics aspired to by futurism. At the same time, the images also capture a patina, a document of the gentle metamorphosis exerted by time. A gentleness, once again, whose dark side we must not forget: that of the airplane as a symbol of the will to power over the skies, which made Asmara one of the air bases from which bombers departed for neighboring Ethiopia, one of the most infamous pages of the regime’s life, which, let us remember, would cause at least 500,000 victims among soldiers and civilians through fascist colonial wars.

The invitation to read the Fiat Tagliero as an ambivalent symbol also comes from Jermay Michael Gabriel, an Italian-Eritrean-Ethiopian artist and curator who has made the archival memories of Italian colonialism a springboard for an artistic practice capable of dismantling the permanence and elusiveness of the imaginary we have mentioned. “In fascist rhetoric, technology and conquest were two sides of the same coin. Industrial progress was not an end in itself, but part of a broader ideological design aimed at projecting the superiority of ‘Italian civilization’ onto territories deemed ‘primitive’. When Benito Mussolini delivered his famous war declaration speech on June 10, 1940 – ‘Fighters on land, at sea and in the air!’ – he was not only announcing Italy’s entry into the Second World War but defining the horizon of fascist modernity”, Jermay Michael Gabriel told Domus.

Flight, both military and symbolic, thus becomes the extension of a will to power, the “expression of its technical virility,” to use again the words of Jermay Michael Gabriel. He warns against identifying Asmara’s Fiat building as a simple tribute to ingenuity. “To celebrate these monuments today without adequate contextualization means risking perpetuating that same epistemological vision. My critique is not aimed at engineering itself, nor at the technical skillfulness of the architects or workers who built the building. It is aimed at the narrative that still often accompanies these spaces: a narrative that celebrates ‘Italian excellence’ without reckoning with what this excellence meant in a colonial context. Italian colonial heritage is often removed from public debate, relegated to a footnote in history books. And yet its symbols are still present, alive, visible. The Fiat Tagliero in Eritrea is one of these. We can no longer afford to look at it only as a masterpiece of Italian engineering. We must look at it for what it is: an ambivalent monument, a product of colonial modernity. A fragment of history that calls for justice, and above all, memory”.