Ferrovia : Longitudinal Section of Hamasien Highlands from Ghinda to , 1914. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. American Geographical Society Archive.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 Proving Ground

SEAN ANDERSON

To break the ground is the first architectural act.1

Before architecture, before the scourge of a populace, the landscape presented an unyielding constant for the making of colonial histories. The ground, functioning as physical entity and metaphoric medium, manifested new histories realized via exploration and occupation. The first marks of human settlement simultaneously registered the speci- ficity of a location while also confirming its boundaries. Situating one- self in the landscape measured the potential of custodial license. One need not erect shelter to provide a spatial condition, but to center one- self within an ever-evolving map of one’s own making to ensure a match between the landscape, vision, and the body.2 Among these locations are multiple scales, grounds. And the knowl- edge of such hidden geographies yields narratives of spaces public and private, seen and invisible.3 What happened to the description and composition of the East African landscape when it became a condition of an Italian colonial spatial history is the focus of this essay, which interrogates the social, geographic, and representational mechanisms that generated Italian colonial space in Asmara, Eritrea. From 1888 until 1941, a number of personal narratives witness the evolution of la colonia primogenita, Italy’s “firstborn” and longest-held colony.4 The earliest descriptions of Eritrea and its capital Asmara are stories of arrival and departure, identification and dislocation. From its ini- tial conception as a proving ground for the Italian military protecting commercial interests to a burgeoning center for mercantile and polit- ical exchange, the colonial city was built first in writings by visiting Europeans. These narratives at once locate and signify the inscription of an Italian colonial atmosphere and character in Asmara.5 Jointly defined as that which constitutes italianità or Italian-ness, these terms must be discussed as distinct literary constructions that aided in com- peting notions of the modern colonial city. In turn, these terms became the benchmark for both colonial architects and subjects alike in Asmara. The deployment of an “Italian atmosphere” and an “Italian character” transformed the narratives and, consequently, architecture of colonial Eritrea the evolved over time across diverse representations.6 Early descriptions of the northeastern reaches of continental Africa, often deemed the Horn of Africa, sought to reconfigure the ground as an intersection of a mythic and commercial imaginary. In 1888, the first

Grey Room 27, Spring 2007, pp. 82–103. © 2007 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 83

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 accounts of Enrico Tagliabue, political hand, explorer, and former decade-long resident of the coastal city , were published in Milan to critical acclaim. Dieci anni a Massawa (Ten Years in Massawa) provided one the earliest characterizations of the Eritrean high- lands and Asmara by an Italian resident. A combination of field report, memoir, and public reckoning for colonial and militaristic intervention, Tagliabue’s gloss of the landscape and peoples he encountered during his fre- Chapter Heading from quent expeditions from Massawa suggest a space “primed” to be occu- Tre Anni in Eritrea, 1901. pied by Italian forces. On the heels of Tagliabue’s successes several of other reports con- cerning East Africa were published in Italy. Fueled by a longing for images of the Italian presence, such texts, while varied, pointed to the potential economic windfall if and when the Italian government was to fully engage in a colonial effort in Eritrea. Eritrea would soon be officially recognized as an Italian colony in 1890. Adolfo Rossi’s 1894 L’Eritrea com’è oggi (Eritrea Is [Like] Today) collects his impressions as an Italian military officer returning across the country from the bloody skirmishes at the 1893 Battle of Agordat in western Eritrea. Rossi’s fleeting, occasionally perceptive commentaries about Eritrea influenced successive of expeditions to the area that began in the first years of the twentieth century. The geographers Olinto Marinelli and Giotto Dainelli, under the auspices of the newly created Società Geografica Italiana, covered the greatest and most difficult of distances in the region. In their observations of 1908, the landscape of Eritrea, despite its harsh realities, signified both scientific and political asso- ciations documented by the team’s apparently simultaneous on-site photographs and written analysis. Independent of Marinelli, Dainelli’s writing proceeds from a fundamental understanding of Eritrea land- scape as an innately “savage” zone into which only an Italian civilità (civilization) can begin to transform that which remains elusive. The Italian colonial government, installed first in Massawa and later transferred to Asmara, brought about substantive changes to the image of Eritrea. Ferdinando Martini, the first civilian governor named in 1897, maintained a profusion of personal and governmental writings that still resonate among historians of post-independence Eritrea. The first volume of his diaries, printed upon Martini’s return to Italy after a decade abroad, is invested with the author’s own mal d’africa (Africa sickness), a spiritual disease of longing for that which once was.7 The term mal d’africa has its foundation in the early writings by explorers on the continent. Part melancholy, part irritation, the phenomenon was adopted colloquially by contemporary Italians and other travelers who, upon returning to their respective countries, felt a loss for the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 places and persons visited on the continent. Martini’s authority within the embryonic colony, as a plenipotentiary civilian among other civil- ians, established the course of Eritrea for almost forty years. One of the most significant colonial texts during this period remains the 1901 autobiography Tre anni in Eritrea (Three Years in Eritrea) by Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi Bossiner. First conceived as a means to com- bat her solitary life as the wife of a colonel in the colony (a commander from 1893 until 1895), Pianavia Vivaldi presented a detailed account of her stay in Eritrea that was accessible to a general audience, and women in particular, eager to hear about the exploits of an Italian woman in Eritrea.8 Her stories were accompanied by personal pho- tographs that record, self-consciously, the range of spaces the author occupied. By virtue of her first-person testimonies, the author’s exploits, including her own interaction with Eritreans, reflect the beginnings of the colony and her own identity as an independent colonial woman. Pianavia Vivaldi’s wistful accounts of her hard-won initiation to Asmara and Eritrea were followed by Renato Paoli’s 1908 Nella colo- nia Eritrea (In the Colony Eritrea). Published the same year as the first articles detailing Marinelli and Dainelli’s explorations, this temporal correspondence suggests a general desire on the part of Italians for more discussions concerning the nearly two-decade-old colony of Eritrea. What is Eritrea for these early writers but a vast, ill-defined space of sometimes irredeemable climatic and hygienic conditions? Misplaced conceptions of the African continent (or continente nero, “Black continent”) are fueled by these speculators of word and space. Supplementing such critiques were Paoli’s observations of the autochthonous communities spread across the region. His commer- cial and political interests in part take the form of musings based on the planning of colonial cities. Five years on, Idelfonso Stanga com- posed his text Una gita in Eritrea (A Trip in Eritrea) with the trained “colonial eyes” of one seeking further legitimization for the Italian colonial project. That these eyes are at once cognizant of the scientific, political, and anthropological currents of the colony suggests that the author is fully absorbed within what Mary Louise Pratt termed the “contact zone.”9 With few exceptions, all of these writings are drawn out in the midst of travel, of movement through and around unknown landscapes. Part observer, part observed, the writer of early narratives in the colony provides an inconsistent, but essential backdrop to Italian colonialism against which scenes of modernity were disclosed in high relief. Vision and possession are thus intertwined phenomena in the making of spaces in Asmara. And the measured articulations of these authors, sited between the unknown and known, from text to image, make the modern in colonial Eritrea.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 La Terra Promessa Ex-delegate to the Società d’Esplorazione Commerciale Africana, Enrico Tagliabue arrived in Eritrea in 1885 with the purpose of convincing the few local Italian officials and priests in addition to any Abyssinian Ras, or chief, that the Italian mission should remain as both military and commercial agent. Citing the fact that in the three years since the first major settlement had been created in Massawa there had only been political “uncertainty and confusion,” the remainder of Tagliabue’s stay in the as-yet-to-be-deeded colony of Eritrea would be one of strik- ing personal and professional contrasts. In the first pages of his account, subtitled “Political-colonial considerations,” he demands that Italy “ponder [its] situation there on the basis of a series of scenes much larger than had ever been seen until now.”10 Tagliabue’s reflections on the state of Italy’s commercial interests in the region, which had long been dogged by aggressive warring groups in and around the port cities of Assab and Massawa, were intended to awaken the government’s need for resolve. He explicitly calls for military action to replace what he feared was an insincere and “inexperienced” parliament at the helm of the Società. “To the African theories born in Italy,” Tagliabue writes with typical venom, there is “a need to substitute an exclusively practical system, which, above all, detaches itself from exaggerations in every sense that are very harmful to whatever cause.”11 With a language of renovation, contemporaneous with the cultiva- tion of an Italian ground, Tagliabue and others like him reconstruct the disjunctive spaces of Eritrea into an unbroken image held together only by the Italian presence. Among Tagliabue’s first descriptions of an almost primeval Massawa, the reader senses the distant govern- ment’s efforts to survey, if not build, the foundations of a future colonial state. Massawa is in a miserable condition partially due to the tremen- dous heat but also because the barracks for new arrivals were now “simply uninhabitable.” Exasperated, Tagliabue contends that despite the ongoing building efforts in Massawa, he has an overwhelming sense that lingering is imprudent.12 For him, the fortifications on both sides of the city were woefully inadequate: “All the defense consisted in a low parapet, without any trench, without any fence, not one of these many elementary obstacles, [that are] very useful in similar cases and especially against a like enemy.”13 But the self-styled “enemy” remains both the perilous location and its occupants. The architecture Tagliabue invokes is one manner by which the Eritrean landscape is first made legible to an Italian audience. Broken, in need of shoring, the swiftly eroding defensive measures in both Italian and indigenous settlements are vulnerable in every way. Only through an act of reno- vation and repair was the ever-emergent sign of an absolute Italian Eritrea fixed.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 Even in memory, the colonial author encourages the production of ubiquitous spaces to enable the inscription of hegemonic objectives. Much like Tagliabue, Adolfo Rossi’s 1894 book L’Eritrea com’è oggi is concerned with delimiting those military measures in the region needed for the security of the Italian state.14 Written as a kind of homage to his fallen comrades, Rossi’s paternal nationalism tempers difficulties faced during his travel to and from the coastal areas. Dogged by his writings, Rossi traverses the colony as he did when a conscripted offi- cer, with prideful yet fleeting visions of himself on the verge of conflict. But Rossi is at odds with himself as an Italian in a foreign land. He does not sustain a nostalgic voice but considers Italy the stan- dard-bearer for all militaristic and commercial activities necessary for the making of colonies and their advancement. Leaving Massawa, Rossi strikes out for Asmara, arriving in the town on 16 February 1894. His descriptions of the journey are marked by his first contacts with highland Eritreans and their architecture. He describes, for instance, the tukùl (a regional building typology)15 of a local chieftain near Keren that prior to a visit by the governor (Antonio Baldissera) was accidentally set on fire by a young boy. The author resists sentimentalizing the building’s loss for the village. Rather, he cites the tukùl’s architectural importance to the area as being like that of the Castel Sant’Angelo in Rome. The tukùl is, according to Rossi, a military stronghold and symbolic bastion for the local elders: the village, like Italy, is protected by faith and the military. Once Rossi reaches Asmara, the promise of a new location and its potential for Italy’s civilizing mission erases these early disappoint- ments. Asmara becomes a place for the entrenchment of Italian military prowess. The settlement, in 1894, is commanded by its forts— ongoing defensive measures against the Abyssinians. Rossi, however, like Tagliabue, is hesitant to fall headlong into an embrace of the local- ity. While the area is clearly a military bastion, for the other Italians the author meets, Asmara is simply a retreat from the heat of the coast, its distinction climatic alone. Rossi recounts his first view of Asmara: “Situated above a highland completely hidden by trees, a little higher than 2,300 meters above the sea, Asmara does not have other attrac- tions than those of the relatively temperate climate: in the summer in fact, the Governor and the other principal functionaries of Massawa come here on vacation.”16 That the settlement is seen at this early date as a location for escape and transit is significant.17 Asmara becomes a place for the institution of beginnings.18 The (narrative) spaces of early Asmara are first maintained by Rossi’s position as traveler and prospector alike. Conceived within these parameters, the future capi- tal of Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI, so named in 1936) was from its onset a place of desire for Italians and Eritreans.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 From Asmara, Rossi explored the Hamasien highlands, describing the development taking place in and around Asmara, the nearby inhab- itants and their buildings. Eritreans were recorded through a lens remaking the scene in Italian terms. Commercial activities and the daily life of the inhabitants, however, are viewed through a lens of pity.19 A combination of the picturesque with a self-fulfilling negativity is a common thread for Rossi and other Italian writers in East Africa. The “Eritrean” village in Asmara was understood as in need of edifi- cation. For example, on Rossi’s visit to the only indigenous building that was not circular, he noted that Between the nonuniform huts one can distinguish a hut that is quadrangular, the Coptic church, where an old man showed us the bells made up of three pieces of [trachite] suspended by threads of metal: on the internal walls of the wretched temple are painted clumsy angels armed with swords, after having shown us these, the old native priest never forgot to ask of us for bacsis, namely the tip.20 Rossi’s writing contains neither sympathy nor a sense of discovery. His willful ambivalence compounds the colonialist stance that he, and others like him, espoused. An irresolvable problem for the author, due in part to the expansion of agricultural experiments begun in Eritrea by the engineer Baron Leopoldo Franchetti, remains one of labor.21 The distance between the peninsula and the colonies was unbridgeable in this regard.22 Rossi’s mention of his meeting with other Italians in Asmara confirms the prospective economic windfall for the colony. He reports that [They] admitted also that the plateau of Asmara was a promised land [una terra promessa] for the cultivation of grain and some legumes, but no private person could manage to cultivate a farm, even one given to them freely, if they did not already have some thousand Lira for the expenses of planting.23 For Rossi, to make a viable colony is a process by which the military first establishes authority. What follows is the rationalizing of land- scape and individual within a matrix of economic and political means. To “own” the land is to cultivate the Italian spirit at home and abroad, a goal unattainable without access to internal governance. Only then may colonization begin.

An Other World Possession is the dream of the colonial. The advent of modernity in the colonial sphere is typically overdetermined as the domain of the armored male, whose preternatural physicality is likened to his own

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 activities as an augur of civilization.24 One exception is Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi, wife of Colonel Domenico dei Marchesi Pianavia Vivaldi. Her studied observations of colonial life in Eritrea, indoors and outdoors, provide a timely riposte to compatriot authors in the colonies. In her 1901 book Tre anni in Eritrea, Pianavia Vivaldi writes a first-person account of her life during the early stages of the colony’s formation.25 A small collection of photographs interspersed through- out the text, a few of which include portraits of herself and others, architecture and domestic quarters, identify the making of a new space in colonial Asmara. The colony is opened up to her as an Italian woman and disclosed through a series of views “taken” from exotic interiors she inhabits. Pianavia Vivaldi is physically and ideologically in between, an instrument of the colonial government as well as a self-styled critic of it. As an author and amateur photographer, she embodies the colonial hybrid. Yet, as Katharyne Mitchell indicates, such precariousness is a vulnerability for the author as well as for the subjects that she chooses to portray. “[W]ithout context,” Mitchell argues, “this ‘in-between’ space risks becoming a mobile reactionary space, rather than a traveling site of resistance.”26 Pianavia Vivaldi’s photographs of the colony point to the difficulty of this posture, yet her text suggests something else. The apprehension of the colonial woman is circumscribed by the emergent modern city.27 As both muse and miscreant in the constitution of modern spaces in Asmara, Pianavia Vivaldi locates her photographs and text within a staged production of an Italian mirage. Yet, they also undermine the narrative occupation of the colony inscribed by male writers of the period. If, as critics have described, the notion or image of the feminine can delineate particular spaces of a dystopic moder- nity, then how might one inscribe such meanings within the Italian colonial city?28 In turn, how does Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi approach the singularly masculinized modernity of Asmara? Emergent colonial cities were crafted by two distinct entities: first, an autocratic govern- ing assembly and its agents; second, the military apparatus. While distinguishing between these already inseparable institutions may be contradictory, in Italian East Africa doing so is necessary if one is to understand the valences of its colonial spaces. In the slow-to-evolve character of Asmara amid the complementary visual and textual descrip- tions by Pianavia Vivaldi, the shared narratives of city and (colonial) body appear. For Pianavia Vivaldi, to write is to fashion herself as a direct wit- ness of the making of colonial topologies. The image of the Italian colonial city functions as an allegory for her own travails as a woman in the colony. Asmara is home and not-home for the author. She crafts an enigmatic interior within Asmara that is both utopic in reach and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 modern by default. Upon her arrival in April 1893, she asks, “But how will one be able to pass the time in Asmara as a poor woman, that is not Commander of the troops, is not an official, is not a soldier, not a farmer?”29 From the first, “In My Sitting Room.” Pianavia Vivaldi disengages her authorial and maternal agency from View of the Sitting Room within this new arena. She functions as progenitor of a “newborn” in the house of Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi, Asmara. colony as well as representative of its development. As Cristina Lombardi- From Tre Anni in Eritrea, 1901. Diop argues, the author’s patriotism, ultimately linked to notions of maternity, is “not yet understood like a necessary biological function of the expansion of the nation [Italy], but as an indispensable symbolic category for the process of national formation.”30 With regard to Eritrea, Pianavia Vivaldi sets this emergence within the larger scope of histor- ical progress: The Italian Colony could illustrate this land, making itself the pioneer of the emerging civilization: because Africa by now has a future, it also makes its turn: Europe after Asia; America after Europe and Asia; Africa now. And if every civilization’s daughter surpassed, for force of progress, the civilization’s mother, what splendid light should not come from the land of the dark?31 The tension of nationalistic discourse informs much of her earliest musings. For the colonial woman, the potential to inflect change within the colony lingered at the edges of daily life. Pianavia Vivaldi’s relations with Italians and Eritreans in Asmara reveal the Italian colonial city as being prostituted; that is, openly commodified but disclosed in private. This, according to Lombardi- Diop, is also common to the fascist period in the colonies (1922–1941), when “fascism’s prevalent attribution of procreation to women” was represented in turn by “the moral and civic mission of the patriotic woman,” as that of the “educator to the children of the country [patria].”32 An unabashed nationalism in these early narratives, however, leads to an ambivalent conception of race in colonial society. The “splendida luce” (splendid light) that informs many texts describing the colonies is, for Pianavia Vivaldi, equalizing: it is the light of Italy’s civilizing mission, the radiance of moral equanimity, which softens the shadows of modernity over the Eritreans. Anne McClintock observes that “nations are symbolically figured as domestic genealogies.”33 Thus the domestic spaces of colonial Asmara are, for the European settler and the Eritrean, dual and recip- rocal. Pianavia Vivaldi frames the domestic realm from the outside with comparative descriptions of Italian buildings alongside those of the Eritrean. The memory of her former house in Italy is suffused with the voices of neighbors. In Asmara, her palazzina (small villa) is distinctive

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 for its autonomy, its distance from the street and the rabble outside. While mov- ing about in Asmara and farther afield, Pianavia Vivaldi deploys her home as a model for a new vision of the colonial city: I had changed my town apartment (very modern house, gas and running water on every floor, rooms in which you could touch the walls just opening your arms, walls that I don’t say permitted conversations, but also the neighbor- hood’s whispers to go through, a garden made with some flower pots placed on the small balcony, causing recurrent protest from below about the occasional innocent shower dropping onto their heads). I had left, I mean, my old nest, for an elegant villa, painted dark red, with green shutters and a zinc roof, which I decorated with ori- Top: Tukùl Under Construction. ental taste, and where, without adding anything else, there was Photograph by Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi. From 34 such a pretty wood oven stove, the first one to come to Asmara. Tre Anni in Eritrea, 1901. The author resurrects the Italian colonial house in Asmara as a Bottom: View of the House of Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi, replacement for that which exists in memory, in an Italy without much Asmara. Photograph by room to spare. Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi. From In the same early chapter, the author describes her house in Asmara Tre Anni in Eritrea, 1901. as a vestige of the historical, now refashioned by her own tastes. The house, while built in the past, is domesticated by nature. Accordingly, she writes from the outside in.35 The “savage” nature of the colony is tended with care in her garden, while the Eritrean landscape is disci- plined in the lens of Pianavia Vivaldi’s camera. Her photographs of Asmara and other towns do not depart from regularity. The geometry of the author’s representations is indistinguishable from that of the built environment she views. Only when she regards the domestic realm does the topography shift from a relative flatness to that of differentiated objects and persons in space. While the Eritrean land- scape bespeaks an expanded version of her home in Italy, the author’s retreat inward, to a colonial intérieur, proves her place at home— albeit momentarily. Pianavia Vivaldi languishes in a house caught between the here and now of Asmara and that of a projected memory. The spaces of Asmara, including the author’s house, are a fusion of nostalgia and an exten- sion of her own presence.36 Here the author is conscious of reuniting with her shared history while maintaining a foothold in the colonial

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 present. Visits of friends and colleagues only further her resolve to institute cultural and social difference within her home. This is accomplished in the repetition of discrete gestures that only her Italian friends can decipher: There is no greater satisfaction than to host Venetian guests for breakfast, and to be able to offer them—thousands of kilometers from the fatherland—that baccalà with polenta, so abhorred by weak stomachs, and by . . . sentimental people, but nevertheless so loved by chosen souls, born in that sweetest land where il xe [she] dreams!37 If physical distance has been betrayed in the cooking of familiar foods, the space between the author and that of her guests is compounded by dreams of a mutable facsimile of Italy. Pianavia Vivaldi’s advancement is understood as that of the colony. When she is static, so, too, are the city and its inhabitants. When the author travels through Asmara and the smaller settlements of Keren and Agordat, she describes the urban realm as an unfolding view, a panorama activated by her own authorial capacity. From the road, she navigates between colonial spaces connoting full-fledged Italian dom- inance and those that remain closed, embryonic. The road to Asmara is “securely carved on the edges of the Eritrean highland by the work of soldiers, Italians, it has opened, at last, what beginning and hope of a daring progress of civility in the African lands.”38 Italian architec- ture and infrastructure invent new ground for the colony; their fabri- cation also imparts the continuity of (Italian) civilization. Only in her text does the architecture of European settlers and that of the Eritrean come to the fore, whereas in her initial photographs of the Hamasien plateau the built landscape is compressed to the hori- zon, flattened, hidden. Pianavia Vivaldi’s descent into Asmara passes through a landscape governed by assemblies of military force.39 The narration of Asmara’s panorama functions as a three-dimensional map unlike the author’s recounting of the details of interiors she visits. Inside, the stratified space of the domestic consists of singular objects or rituals that are extensions of the author’s body. The multiplication of views of a distant Asmara from a bend in the Italian-built road begin to awaken Pianavia Vivaldi’s colonizing voice, her maternal instinct, to close the distance between herself and the other. “The lodgings, the barracks, the offices, built by the Italians,” she exclaims, “provide the guise of monumental edifices; but still had not awakened some emu- lation in the natives, nor changed the habits of the place.”40 The colonial city is modified by this ordering, much like the desired effect of the author’s interior, where objects are eruptions of “natural” progress, skillfully reconstructed by an Italian gaze.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 Pianavia Vivaldi is consumed by her panorama of Asmara. She resolves to explore among the indigeni (indigenous persons) who live where the seams of her images do not meet. She writes, “In order to know and to study up close the intimate life of this people, I frequently, accom- View of the Market, Asmara. panied by some kind of official and by the turgimann—interpreter— Photograph by Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi. From went around in the village, in the market, observing, confronting, Tre Anni in Eritrea, 1901. visiting the residences.”41 In Pianavia Vivaldi’s self-reflexive panorama, the Eritrean built environment is considered so antithetical to the con- structions to which she is accustomed that her physical distance is intensified in front of the village(s). Indeed, in a chapter entitled “Altro Mondo” (Other World) the author insists on the divide between European and Eritrean whereby the radical separation of race and class ensures her difference in the scene: And here I say immediately that the pompous name of the town, given by all of the travelers from the big native inhabitants’ centers, makes one smile in pity for those poor devils that do not have the minimum of the comforts one finds in our countries. Their centers of population are not other than agglomerations of wretched boxes or huts, which, according to their shape, from the material and of their size, change name.42 From the author’s perspective, the village is composed of types, read- able and sensorial forms that emblematize their contrast to Italian models of civility: So the rectangular houses in masonry—stones cemented with a mush-paste—with flat roof of straw and soil, one calls hedmò [sic], the huts with cylindrical walls in masonry, by the roof cone beams and straw, reasonably spacious, are called adaràsc; and, if smaller, agdò; those constructed only of branches and of straw, tukùl.43 Soon after, Pianavia Vivaldi recalls that none of the houses she sees “has more than a ground floor: the Churches are in the shape of hidmò and of adaràsc, and they seem to be a rather wretched thing to us, accustomed to seeing them, even in the smallest villages, superimposed on the others, the house of God.”44 In this knot of Eritrean buildings, the ground recedes and religion seems an afterthought. The streets (if not the houses) remain empty, though the recalcitrant Italian colonial writer remains both an anthropologist and unapologetic ethnographer. This taxonomic blueprint in which indigenous formal attributes can be remedied by a visual and structural ordering is complicated when the author moves into Eritrean domestic space. Here, the ground

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 is that which distinguishes the Eritrean from the Italian. Colonial conscious- ness is discernible in the performance of complex ritual systems within the interior. But Pianavia Vivaldi’s move- View of “Indigenous Village,” ment along the peripheries of these structures destabilizes her place Asmara. Photograph by as a colonist. Caught between her own place of origin and that of her Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi. From Tre Anni in Eritrea, 1901. nascent simulacrum, the other world of the author is an architecture in which the imposition of meaning is needed. If the Italian colonial interior is a resolute space of (re)collection, the Eritrean interior is sim- ilarly conceived. The author describes the “empty space” of one hut: “In their residences, no pieces of furniture, no comforts, no needle- work; but alone, around the walls, fixed some horn of goat, or of an ox, to use ceremonial clothing, to support rifles, lances, swords, shields, finery for horses and mules.”45 The interior walls of the Eritrean hut, accentuated by the implements of a long-lost war, spring from a ground that is primeval, preternaturally “native.” Without furniture, the Eritrean interior is occupied by the shadow of the colo- nizer, into whose footprints the Eritrean must step as imitation.46 In Tre anni in Eritrea, Pianavia Vivaldi crafts the colonial travelogue as a twinned allegory. Among her panoramic visions, home substitutes for landscape, and the home implodes as an invisible colony. The author’s traversal of the city and its supplement—the Eritrean vil- lage—ultimately brings her to a modern intérieur—her home in Asmara. Outside and in, the synchronic reconstruction of colony and house in her text and images dissolves the limits of those mechanisms originally intended to define colonial hegemony. With Pianavia Vivaldi’s collection of photographs from both Italian and Eritrean spheres, she proves that from behind her scrutinizing lens she is able to exist in an other city, an other colony populated by the objects she covets, inscrib- ing the colonial woman as an arbiter of the modern.

The Character of Utopia Idelfonso Stanga’s 1913 travelogue Una gita in Eritrea (A Trip in Eritrea) recounts his extensive journeys throughout Eritrea combined with an exacting scientific approach to those persons and locations that he encountered. Assigning unidentified rare plants, trees, and animals from train and car windows, the landscape is close at hand, almost touching. The specificity with which the natural world is interrogated furthers the author’s (and others’) need for Eritrea to be a wilderness, an uncharted territory to be modernized and authenticated through Italian know-how. Stanga simultaneously reveals his careful perspec- tive and entreats the reader to follow, and even emulate, him. Small photographic vignettes within the text intensify the descrip-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 tions of the author’s experience, confirming his location within the colony. Stanga forges colonialist propaganda in which landscape and technology, discourse and vision, multiply the meanings of Eritrea as a colonial space. Here author and landscape are compound tenses: by writing the landscape (both in picturesque and empirical terms), the colony is presented with esoteric knowledge. Stanga writes as if he were expecting such discoveries. The landscape is given to the reader via an omniscient narrator, allowing one to enter these rarefied spaces and colonize them. Subsumed in this foreign environment, Stanga traverses the taxing mountain terrain between the coast of Massawa and Asmara by train, automobile, and foot. Unlike earlier authors who found solace within contexts that immediately spoke to their italianità, Stanga is at his most prolific at the boundaries of Italian jurisdiction, beyond the circle of the city. On the outskirts of Massawa, the author immediately real- izes the implication of his departure. The mountainous region in between the colony’s two most populated centers proves to be a veri- table laboratory for his guise as naturalist. Newfound temporalities disclose his place as a colonial within the urban and natural realms as Stanga’s passage is staged for and by him. Stanga is a colonial flaneur. The Eritrean landscape opens up around him as the modern city might. The path the author follows, although taken by others before him, is one in which change (of climate, of plant life) is embraced. At the station of Mai-Atal the first signs of highland flora and fauna appear. The author elatedly writes of the con- trast, “thus, with your spirits lifted by the picturesque landscape and by the thriving and varied vegetation, your body strengthened by very fresh and light air, you reach the attractive basin of Ghinda.”47 Once again, the observer is assured by the light and air of unquestionable provenance. Weather not only informs his perception of the setting but also establishes his own difference. Among these chronicles, atmosphere is both foreign and local. Stanga is both in the places he sees as well as outside of them. When he reaches the settlement of Ghinda after climbing slowly through the mountain passes to 950 meters, the author likens both the climate and the appearance of the landscape to the Apennines when he sees a certain type of olive tree. Unlike Massawa, the air here is always “salubrious.” Images of benign nature are com- pared to the marvels of Italian skill. Ghinda is the last stop of the Italian railway, signaling one’s entrance to the Hamasien plateau and Asmara. Planned disembarkation here, for Stanga as well as other writers before him including Ferdinando Martini, is accompanied by suppressed eagerness because it represents the first extended period spent outside the comforts of Italian engineering, if not of Italian space.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 Signaling to the hills farther ahead, Stanga comments that the curves cut into the mountainside are far too abrupt for the individual wagon cars of the train. But the train tracks are a “truly marvelous work!”48 he revels as the lines furnish his vanishing point. Soon after disembarking from the train at an altitude of 2,450 meters, Stanga is a guest at an old “Abyssinian” monastery appropriately named “la Visione” (the Vision). The unfolding landscape and the marvels of flowers and trees are seen from above, a precursor to later aerial photographic images, and Stanga renders this panoramic image within a totalizing scene. During the passage from Massawa to Ghinda, the author’s glances are momentary, constantly in movement. The author deems that there and beyond the climate changed from one that por- tended disease to one of “atmospheric precipitations,” “almost always humid” and rife with natural discovery. For the colonial travelogue, atmosphere collapses the sensorial with a variant, be it animal or object. Stanga’s first encounter with the “inhabitants” of the Hamasien plateau is with a large group of monkeys, whose arrival the author describes with animated surprise in the midst of discussing the char- acteristics of highland botany.49 The encounter demonstrates his own racial stereotyping. Incommunicative yet dangerous, the crowd, whether animal or human, is a standard trope in this and other travel accounts in the colonial world, and the trope is extended in the author’s pho- tographs of his “Arrival in Massawa” and “Asmara’s marketplace.”50 Stanga then remarks on the monkeys as if seeing himself (or his countrymen) not as an absolute reflection but an uncomfortable recog- nition of continuity: “The ancestors/firstborn are less impudent than people say; but they have no concern for their descendants . . . that board the train!”51 Italian Eritrea, as the “firstborn” colony, is occupied by the “firstborn” of the animal species—as well as by Eritreans— whose unnerving behavior will be that which the colonial government will attempt to revolutionize through imported traditions and scopic dominion. Once the author reaches Asmara, a temporary stasis blurs his descriptions. Stanga manipulates the mode by which he describes his findings. No longer are animals and plants causes for revelation, and his role as botanist and zoologist immediately diminishes. The author’s transit from the station into town substitutes for another kind of tour. Stanga’s is a perilous internalized travelogue in which he first glimpses the dwellings of the indigeni from the train station, a distant impression of the quartiere indigeno (indigenous quarter) seen in profile, whereas the villaggio is a silhouette of conical roofs with an immeasurable quantity of figures in white. From the shock of primacy to the impossibility of modern architecture, the built environment of Asmara is uncategorically progressive. The author feels it is unchar-

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 acteristic when he exclaims, “Whoever built the beautiful small train station believed maybe excessively in the future development of the capital of Eritrea.”52 The passage from the sea to the highlands is one of (colonial) man’s evolution from mosquito to ape to modern city seen through the bounded view from train or automobile. An evaluation of Eritrean architecture, while speculative, does not incur the same kind of posi- tivist identification for the author that he used when spying the intri- cacies of plant life. Stanga’s first sighting of the tukùl in the quartiere indigeno is one of scientific absolution: “On the right the aboriginal village is noticed, which at first is irregularly grouped together around the Coptic church, then extends in tucul [sic] aligned and regular thus betraying the sensible hand of Italy.”53 Stanga finally sees the past in the ruins of the compound of the former warlord Ras Alula.54 The author’s recognition of this historical figure’s abominations prior to the arrival of European settlers in Asmara is described as a source for Italian demagoguery, fecundity, and indeed modernity: “Now the blood has sprouted and under what was his residence, a white vegetation of houses grew, cleaned, aligned, ordered.”55 From the taming of nature, a rewriting of Asmara’s history, arises the foundation of an Italian colonial modernity. Stanga observes the intricacies of highland architecture with the same scientific approach he deploys with persons, most often a eugen- ics-based calculation of physical characteristics. The measure of the Eritrean body, following an ethnographic reckoning of front and side profiles, is transposed onto the buildings of Asmara. Indigenous archi- tecture, for Stanga, is analogous to that which he fears. The physiog- nomy of Italian architecture in Asmara is unlike that of the colonial subject. Two bodies, two visions, the modern city is first built by divi- sion.56 Between the villaggio indigeno on one side of the road and the mar- ket on the other, Stanga describes the embrace of religion as a sign of the Italian and native’s common inheritance. But the arrangement of these structures in the village illustrates the author’s predilection for the stratification of city and nature alike. Adjacent to the village of tukùl is the Christian church. To its left, surmounting a hill but still much lower is the former tukùl of Ras Alula. Above and nearby is the mosque, between the market and the tukùl. He continues that he knows of the Greek church, the synagogue, and the Swedish protestant church, but they are not described. Stanga employs air as a signifier for the preponderance of Italians in the city, and he immediately returns to the invisibility of belief by describing the air as a diminish- ing affirmation: “The air of Asmara, very fresh and vibrant, keeps extinguished every religious fervor.”57 In Asmara, Stanga escapes the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 mosquito- and heat-driven madness of the coastal areas to find refuge in a place where the air and architecture, the very constituents of an Italian atmosphere, are tantalizingly unsullied.58 Nature, rather than the artifacts of semi-permanent European settlers, forges an undeni- ably familiar character. For the author, the colony of Eritrea flourishes with the cultivation of his distant nation’s reception. Stanga concludes his voyage from Massawa to Asmara much as he began: in a state of transfixed propriety. Without hesitation, he writes that he is witnessing the life of a new people, whose regeneration is due to an all-encompassing Nature. Out in the tree-lined streets of exotic Asmara, Stanga stands alone while the city revolves about him. His beneficent “colonial eyes” see constant movement on the ground and in the sky. Because of its continual circulation, the uncontami- nated air of Asmara pulls the indigenous into view, including “a var- ied hodgepodge of whites and blacks, a tangle of mules and camels, which often enter the market in caravan.”59 But even these sights dis- appear, if temporarily, with another breeze that “put in the ventilated air of this Asmara a smiling mood.”60 And so Stanga turns inward, to the interior of the Albergo Menghetti, in whose “good kitchen” he finds a “caffè più lungo.” This is home for him. Others, like so many a cinematographer Stanga runs into, prefer the delights of the outdoors in the gloaming. Following his passeggiata (evening walk) into the city center, he returns to the familiar. In his room, the author finds solace, a moment of tranquillity and air, which at 2,400 meters “must be deli- cious.” From his window, “in this little capital,” Stanga unabashedly confirms that in Asmara, with its “fresh air, safety, cleanliness . . . the Italian is loved, respected and venerated.”61

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 Top: Tukùl Under Construction. Photograph by Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi. From Tre Anni in Eritrea, 1901. Bottom: View of the house of the area Commandant. Photograph by Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi. From Tre Anni in Eritrea, 1901.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 Notes 1. Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 101–104. 2. Valerio Toccafondi describes the formation of early Italian colonial maps in East Africa as functioning within a number of registers. See Valerio Toccafondi, “La carto- grafia coloniale italiana,” Fonti e problemi della politica coloniale Italiana, vol. #2, Atti del convegno, Taormina-Messina, 23–29 October 1989 (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e ambientali, 1996), 1116. 3. Michel Foucault, “Questions on Geography,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 69. In the interview Foucault allies such knowledge with the foundations of power. 4. Italian traveler-writers who were familiar with the vagaries of the region from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries include Luigi Pennazzi (1838–1895), Giovanni Battista Licata (1856–1886). Gustavo Chiesi (1855–1909), Ruffillo Perini, Francesco da Offejo, Guido Corni (1882–1946), and Alberto Denti di Pirajno (1886–1968). 5. Carattere (character) is also a trope in discussions of the planning and building of Asmara after the Declaration of the Italian (African) Empire on 9 May 1936. 6. To move beyond their formal linguistic derivation is important because such terms fall within that which Edward Said calls “imaginative geographies.” Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 49–73. Nicholas Thomas comments that Said “made the crucial and powerful step of moving from the figure of the ‘image’ to the object of discourse, which is seen to construct a world, geographic domain, or ethnic grouping in a comprehensive way, rather than merely express a particular per- ception of something that already existed.” Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 37. 7. For an analysis of this term among literary constructions of masculinity in the nineteenth century, see Christina Lombardi-Diop, “Writing the Female Frontier: Italian Women in Colonial Africa, 1890–1940” (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1999). 8. Other female writers responding to the Italian frontier include Elena d’Orleans, the Duchessa d’Aosta (1871–1951), whose journals were written in French. See Lombardi-Diop, “Writing the Female Frontier.” See also Loredana Polezzi, “The Mirror and the Map: Italian Women Writing the Colonial Space,” Italian Studies 61, no. 2 (Autumn 2006): 191–205; and Sean S. Anderson, “Modernità and Interiorità in Colonial Asmara,” Italian Studies 61, no.2 (Autumn 2006): 231–249. 9. Mary Louise Pratt defines “contact zones” as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical rela- tions of domination and subordination.” A contact zone is both spatial and temporal, identified within the discourses of colonialism and interiority. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 4–7. 10. Enrico Tagliabue, Dieci anni a Massaua (Milan: Tipografia P.B. Bellini, 1888), 7. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. 11. Tagliabue, 7. 12. Tagliabue, 8. “Without means of transport and without being ready for all even- tualities, from absolute immobility we passed to the offensive and with extreme fool- ishness we made the demand with little less than a hundred men to occupy completely

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 useless places for us.” 13. Tagliabue, 9. 14. Adolfo Rossi, L’Eritrea com’è oggi: Impressioni di un viaggio dopo la battaglia di Agordat (Rome: Voghera, 1894). 15. Found throughout northeastern Africa, the tukùl is typically understood as a thatched, circular dwelling with variable circumference. 16. Rossi, 166. 17. To borrow from Michel de Certeau, if Asmara is conceived as the essence of a permanent Italian city and colony, then it must arise from an “originary non-place,” an empty space into which both persons and words evolve. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 90–91. 18. For Homi Bhabha, such “beginnings can . . . be the narrative limits of the know- able, the margins of the meaningful.” Homi Bhabha, “The World and the Home,” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 146. 19. Adolfo Rossi, 167. “The market descends to a clearing where about fifty indigeni of both sexes are seated with stiff sacks nearby containing red peppers dried by the sun, coffee of bad quality and some drugs.” 20. Rossi, 167. 21. While efforts for agricultural and demographic colonization implemented by the colonial government had not yet begun in earnest, Franchetti initiated a series of hydraulics and agricultural experiments outside Asmara and near Massawa in the 1890s with the future of the colony in mind. 22. When southern Italian farmers were transported to the inhospitable territories of Cyrenaica in eastern Libya in the 1910s and 1920s, they were given inadequate funds and equipment with which to commence the planned agricultural transforma- tion of Italy’s “Fourth Shore.” 23. Rossi, 167. 24. The photographic image of the triumphant male—at the head of his family or as a participant in the building of the East African colonies—was common. Later efforts under the Fascist regime to bolster the formation of masculine stereotypes were advanced by the media and rhetoric of the party. But Sandro Bellassai counters that this period was also affected by a malaise or neurosis among Italian men brought about by incessant militarism. Sandro Bellassai, “The Masculine Mystique: Antimodernism and Virility in Fascist Italy,” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10, no. 3 (2005): 315–316. See also the important text by Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). 25. Rosalia Pianavia Vivaldi, Tre anni in Eritrea (Milan: L.F. Cogliati, 1901). 26. Katharyne Mitchell, “Different Diasporas and the Hype of Hybridity,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 15 (1997): 534. 27. Foucault extends this allusion by suggesting “that control over sexuality becomes inscribed in architecture.” Michel Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” in Power/ Knowledge, ed. Gordon, 150. Numerous photographs from the Italian colonies depict indigenous East African women with an Italian settlement as the background. 28. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “Catastrophic Utopia: The Feminine as Allegory of the Modern,” Representations 14 (Spring 1986): 220–229. See also the collected essays in Writing Women and Space: Colonial and Postcolonial Geographies, ed. Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose, (New York: The Guilford Press, 1994).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 29. Pianavia Vivaldi, 25. 30. Cristina Lombardi-Diop, “Madre della nazione: Una donna italiana nell’Eritrea coloniale,” in Sandro Matteo and Stefano Bellucci, eds. Africa Italia: Due continenti si avvicinano (Santarcangelo di Romagna: Fara Editore, 1999), 117–36, 119. 31. Pianavia Vivaldi, 178. 32. Lombardi-Diop, “Madre della nazione,” 119. 33. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Sexuality, and Gender in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995), 357. 34. Pianavia Vivaldi, 26–27. 35. With its “wood, garden and park . . . for the hens,” an implacable nature “sur- rounded the small villa; and, in a few meters, a gracious outdoor shelter all covered by flowers, a residence from the time of the first Generals, and then converted to the humble office of lodging for my servants [persone di servizio].” Pianavia Vivaldi, 27. 36. Memory of Pianavia Vivaldi’s former home lingers like so much furniture in her current residence: “The caretaker of the house demands her time: and then there are the nightly walks, the rides, the books, the newspapers—from which it is con- templated with emotion even the address on the wrapper—and the letters to write all of the friends of the universe, and the instantaneous photography, and the visits, in which, the last arrived were obliged to walk about the house in search of chairs.” Pianavia Vivaldi, 27. 37. Pianavia Vivaldi, 27–28. 38. Pianavia Vivaldi, 31–32. 39. “Who comes from the Porte del Díavolo [Gates of the Devil] finds first, to the right, a nucleus of houses and of huts: it is the Swedish Mission; then the Abyssinian Church surrounded by the village, and little after, the market; more to the right still, another small village. On the left, perched on top of a hill, were the houses inhabited by the notorious Ras Alula, surrounded by groups of huts and of houses. Over a hillock enclosed rise the barracks and the lodgings of the Italian soldiers; on its eastern down- ward slope, the villages of the indigenous soldiers extend by themselves; on the oppo- site downward slope, groups of masonry houses, between those extend the villas of the Governor, the Command of the zone, from the Circle of the officials, the house of Father Bonomi, to which is attached the microscopic little church; and little by little, very far and dispersed, other villages and small forts, and barracks, and houses, until the flanks of the Bet-Makà, on which is raised the imposing Fort Baldissera.” Pianavia Vivaldi, 29–30. 40. Pianavia Vivaldi, 32. 41. Pianavia Vivaldi, 45. 42. Pianavia Vivaldi, 45. 43. Pianavia Vivaldi, 45–46. 44. Pianavia Vivaldi, 46. 45. Pianavia Vivaldi, 51. 46. “All of them go by bare feet, except someone that occasionally puts on sandals, made of a sole held stretched to the toes by weaving strips of leather. But one cannot say how much they love our shoes, and with what conceited boldness they wear them—if they had the luck of having a pair as a gift—even if squeezed and shortened in a way as to maim the foot. Who is happier than this people, when it has the oppor- tunity to put on some European clothing? And you can believe that it takes on a ridiculous aspect, and loses all of its elegance.” Pianavia Vivaldi, 52–53.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/grey.2007.1.27.82 by guest on 24 September 2021 47. Idelfonso Stanga, Una gita in Eritrea (Milan: L.F. Cogliati, 1913), 42. 48. Stanga, 42. 49. “[T]he monkeys that we have seen at first were not sentinels; the group, the army was concealed to us by a small outcropping.” Stanga, 45. 50. Compare Stanga’s description to that of Gustavo Bianchi writing of the same area: “The country route from Ailèt until Asmara is uninhabited and uncultivated; it is too bad really, because the ground, to judge from the natural vegetation, especially in the first half of the road, must be very suitable to production.” Carlo Zaghi, ed., L’ultima spedizione Africana di Gustavo Bianchi (Milan: Edizioni Alpes, 1930), 155. 51. Stanga, 45. 52. Stanga, 46. 53. Stanga, 46. Stanga details in a footnote the particularities of the Eritrean archi- tecture he observes. He follows this discussion with a description of other housing types including the hidmò (spelled hüdmò) and a brief description of the local hous- ing of the Bogos in Keren. Stanga describes the tukùl as “circular huts, in masonry up to the roof, which is built of a vegetal cover. They represent a type of inhabitation, originally from the coast, where they are aligned not far from the rectangular huts native to the region of Zula. The Government there has adopted and sanctioned them, prescribing also how they must be arranged and constructed in the major centers, where the continual emigration produced the so-called markets and there has adapted them to the stops and in the military camps, also in regions like Asmara, Keren, etc., where the indigenous type of inhabitation is quite different.” Stanga, 47. 54. Gustavo Bianchi describes the mythic significance of Ras Alula’s memory and his material remains in Asmara in a compilation of notes from his diary. He also notes that his expedition proved useful for studying the geography and topography of the region. Zaghi, 227. 55. Stanga, 46; emphasis added. 56. Mia Fuller has described such tactics within a Foucauldian milieu in relation to the rebuilding of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Fuller, “Wherever You Go, There You Are: Fascist Plans for the Colonial City of Addis Ababa and the Colonizing Suburb of EUR ’42,” Journal of Contemporary History 31 (1996): 401. See also, Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Italian Colonial Architecture and Urbanism (New York: Routledge, 2006). 57. Stanga, 47. 58. Stanga, 48. 59. Stanga, 48. 60. Stanga, 49–50. 61. Stanga, 50.

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