Eritrea has suffered from the battles on its border, but Asmara has remained a beautiful town at ease with itself. Mark Turner reports 

"Asmara is like a lovely old woman who needs a little make-up," sighs Giuseppe Cinnirella, as we pause briefly in one of the Eritrean capital's shady avenues. His sinewy frailty is quite forgotten as he describes his beautiful home town. 

Born in 1925 to Italian colonists seeking a new and more glorious world, Cinnirella is a true Asmaran; he has loved these streets since childhood, and revels in the chance to reveal their treasures to a western visitor. It is a rare treat. 

Every corner of this wonderful city is brimming with architectural confidence. Its blanched villas, churches, mosques, gelatteria, tiled  pavements and leafy squares speak more of a gentle and well-to-do  Mediterranean resort than the feuding Horn of Africa; it is a town at ease  with itself. Society is surprisingly unified and betrays little of the  strains of extreme poverty and of the sapping border war with its southern  neighbour. 

But most of all, Asmara is dominated by some of the world's most remarkable  modernist and art deco designs, built in the mid to late 1930s when Eritrea  spearheaded Italy's march towards a reborn Roman empire. 

"Usually we find only examples, sometimes a group of buildings, possibly a  whole street, but in the high, dry mountains of Eritrea stands a complete  art deco city, virtually intact due to the isolation of war," writes Mike  Street, a British architect. 

Few cities in Africa retain such a strong image of their colonial past, and  speak so eloquently of its moods. The flowery ornamentalism of the early 1910s and 1920s villas attest to an age when Italians hoped to recreate the 
land they left behind, but also to absorb quietly a new culture thousands of miles away. 

This was a time when the conquerors were happy to mix with the local  population; peaceful piazzas, charming pensioni, soothing streets resulted. 

An elegant cathedral from the 1920s towers over the city centre, evoking  images of Lombardy, bells forged from first world war cannons. At the back,  a plaque lists its patrons - Luigi di Savoia, and one Benito Mussolini. 

The ghosts of Italian var-iety performers still haunt the grand archways of  the Teatro Asmara; off the Piazza Roma, the balustrades of the Popular  Cooperative Bank of Eritrea, built in 1915, tell of an age of European  nobility. 

"You see the roof? It used to have an eagle on it, but it's gone now," says  Cinnirella. Round the corner is his father's flour mill; a bit further is  the electric house, where he was born. 

As the Fascist era dawned, however, an all-embracing vision enveloped the  town: one of selfless application to a hard-edged regime, forward-looking  but firm. Asmara offered an unparalleled opportunity - here was a tabula 
rasa where the modernists could revel in their vision, unencumbered by their  homeland's attachment to a difficult past. 

This was the period of rationalism, when Marcelo Piacentini, the doyen of  Italian architects, could propose a "vast programme of integral   construction" - not unlike the rebuilding of regions destroyed by  earthquakes in Italy; when Vittorio Caffiero, the urban planner, could  design a stark new zonal system, with the indigenous population isolated 
from the Italians. 

But it was also an oppor-tunity to express the elegance of the International  Moderne style, functional but highly aesthetic. Disciplined, but tempered  with Italy's irrepressible flair. 

"The old town drawn up by Odoardo Cavagnari, with its liberty lines, and the   colonial community with its modest needs, were quickly overwhelmed by a fast   and steady influx of newly arriving Italians," writes Eugenio Lo Sardo, in  Asmara style. 

The city mushroomed: both a supply centre for the northern frontline, and a  prosperous commercial centre in its own right. The number of Europeans rose  from 4,000 to 53,000, of a total population of 98,000. The streets were 
filled with cars, unknown in much of Italy; fortunes were made,   entertainment flourished. Asmara   was a dream to emigrant Sicilians, who  hitherto had known only hardship. 

Such progress had to be celebrated. In the same way that Rome left its mark   throughout the empire, so - dreamed Piacentini - would modern Italy bequeath   an unmistakable mark on its domain. From 1935 to 1939, Asmara was 
transformed. Bold cinemas, cafes and offices sprang up, decorated with a   tough but elegant geometry. A city of rectangles, circles and grids, with   corners set in wide and gentle curves. 

Cinnirella's tales of a colonial childhood transport us from the horrors of   today's war to an era of optimism and prosperity, when Asmara personified   Mussolini's promises of a glorious new civilisation. 

"In the old Asmara the economy was good, work was good," he reminisces; his   eyes can still see the electric cars passing through the main thoroughfare, his classmates from 1932 scampering to their elegant primary school to learn the virtues of hard work and dedication. 

It is easy to imagine. A Fiat service station is poised to soar skywards, born on huge concrete wings. The Cinema Impero is a monolithic space station, fronted by curious portholes and regimented windows. The Nuova 
Fontana coaxes water down a series of strikingly geometric steps, which even today evoke a better, cleaner future. 

As Cinnirella and I proceed down the main thoroughfare, we pass the imposing ministry of education building - built as a fascist centre, later adopted as a recreational club - looming over the city's central thoroughfare with a 
fierce intensity. This was the new Asmara at its most severe. 

Yet across the road, Eritreans sip coffees in the pavement cafes, look for friends to greet, pass the time of day. Echoes of Italian drift from their lips - the occasional swear word, which might offend in their own language, but notable by their rarity. 

They are scarcely aware of the imperialistic dream which stands only yards away. The thoroughfare's name itself mocks any effort to impose any ideology in this troubled country - it has been called Mussolini, Italian, Haile 
Selassie, Revolution and now Liberation Avenue. 

And therein lies Asmara's charm. It has taken all the outside world can throw at it, and assimilated it into a supremely satisfying whole. Even the peeling remnants of the garish colours favoured by the socialist Derg era 
can still be found, a brutal regime reduced to a quaint curiosity. 

If western tourists ever return to this country, they will be hard-pressed not to succumb to its charms. For his part, Cinnirella never had any doubts. "This is my country, my city," he says, with pride. "I love it too much."