Ferrovia Eritrea: Longitudinal Section of Hamasien Highlands from Ghinda to Asmara, 1914. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. American Geographical Society Archive. 82 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 Massawa, 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 84 Grey Room 27 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. Anderson | Proving Ground 85 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