Far too many of the strikingly good-looking young women of Asmara spend far too much time hanging around the Intercontinental Hotel, an overwrought, air-conditioned behemoth gobbling up a nowhere land between the Eritrean capital and its modest airport.
Here, they drink Coke and flirt with well-fed Italian UN soldiers, who, when not carousing, perform important duties like flexing and oiling their gym-pumped muscles by the hotel's pools.
That's pools: plural; in a country that has been suffering a five- year drought. This is a country overrun by well-cushioned foreign soldiery, 4 x 4-borne charities and NGOs. There are so many of these that sometimes theirs are the only cars on the dusty roads leading into and out of this extraordinary, and largely bypassed, city set high on the East African escarpment, high enough to set your heart racing if you rush about on your first day here.
I mention the girls, the soldiers and the Intercontinental because this unholy triptych representing contemporary Asmaran life prompted me to wonder if Eritrea has ever truly shaken off its colonial yoke. This was an Italian colony from 1898, when the first gover-nor was appointed, until 1941 when the British won control of this blisteringly hot Red Sea country. It later became an Ethiopian dependency, until after a 30 year war, Isiais Afewerki and his plastic sandal-wearing Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front won control of their own country.
For the next seven years, Eritrea basked in a reputation of being one of the most open and tolerant countries in Africa before a renewed clash with Ethiopia led to a presidential clampdown and a return to the country of all those UN troops spooning with the local girls, and NGOs by the baffling-acronym load.
Even so, Asmara itself is one of the most enchanting cities in Africa. I nearly typed "Italy," for this is a city largely created by the Italians over a very short period, and one in which the surprised visitor will find astonishingly similar to some cities in southern Italy and especially those built on the Pontine marshes by Mussolini in the 1930s.
Here you can eat all the pizza, pasta and ice cream your stomach could possibly desire, along with goat stew mopped up by injera, a sponge-like local pancake that may, or may not, be made with wheat.
Pavement cafes proffer cappuccino and espresso from vintage Italian coffee machines along with saccharine-sweet Arabic mint tea and refreshing Asmara (formerly Melotti) beer.
At sunset, the city sets out on a passegiatta, old men in double- breasted suits doffing Borsolino hats as they stroll along wide pavements under royal palms. They address foreigners in the Italian they learned as boys when what is now an utterly convincing Italian modernist city of the 1930s was a frenetic building site. Between 1935 and 1941, young Italian architects, and seasoned contractors working to a detailed urban plan, built somewhere between 400 and 500 fine new designs here: theatres, cinemas, hotels, churches, mosques, covered markets, city halls and, of course, a Casa del Fascio.
The Casa del Fascio, shaped in the guise of a giant rendered-concrete "F' is now a part of the ministry of education. It broods, although in ice cream colors, so it can't be all that broody, at one end of Harnet, or Independence Avenue, the broad thoroughfare that characterizes and sets the pace for this would-be east African Rome and which has changed its name with each new regime, indigenous or imperial.
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