Un'infrastruttura coloniale tra i simboli dell'Eritrea contemporanea: la ferrovia Massaua-Asmara

The object of the research concerns the history of infrastructures, landscapes and settlements derived from the Italian colonial activity in Eritrea with a specific focus on the area connecting Massawa to Asmara, touching upon the issue of their perception as a Heritage in contemporary Eritrean frame. In printed sources all along the Italian colonial period, the issue of communications and transports stands out for its paramount importance both for military reasons and for the so-called “messa in valore” of the newly conquered territories. Although crucial for understanding relations between the development of settlements, economic strategies and political relations, the communication system is not recurrent in present literature about Eritrean colonial past, which is mainly focused on urban architectural heritage. Nevertheless for the colonial administration and the Italian government, this branch of activities required relevant efforts in planning and engineering, and it offers the opportunity to consider the results of the work of technicians enrolled in the Genio Militare and Civile, and the contribution provided by Italian academics and companies of the time. Moreover the landscape that slowly took shape is the evidence of a quite articulated relation between Italian administration and coloni, and local inhabitants’ culture and traditions. In the first part the study aims at outlining the development of communication infrastructures in Colonial Eritrea as the result of several and sometimes contradictory projects for its military control and its economic improvement, pointing out the relevance of the axis going from Massawa to Asmara. In the following part the history of the infrastructures along this axis has been retraced: their past bears witness of the sequence of the Italian policies concerning the Colony all along its historical process, and displays the technical and technological knowledge acquired in Italy and adapted to the various conditions posed by the Eritrean territory. The infrastructures are constituted of a road, which in 1941 was defined by the British “in every way a triumph of engineering“, of a narrow gauge railway and of a ropeway, which was one of the longest in the world in the Thirties: in different ways and in different steps, the road, the railway and the ropeway had impacts on the territory which triggered transformations acted both by local people and by Italian coloni, and created peculiar landscapes along the way. A specific study deals with the meaning of Colonial Heritage in Eritrean contemporary context, which has peculiarities due to the role of colonial past in the process of emancipation from Ethiopia and formation of Eritrean identity as a nation. The aim is to point out if and how the attention paid to the colonial architectural heritage of Asmara (which entered the World Heritage List in July 2017) and in a different way to the railway (a rehabilitation project was carried out from 1994 to 2002 on Eritrean initiative), can find a general common ground and be transferred also on infrastructures and their remains, as well as on the cultural landscape there defined.