Italian Eritrea

Eritrea, 1890–1936. Draft, not yet reviewed

Italian Eritrea was a colony of the Kingdom of Italy in the territory of present-day Eritrea. In 1889 the Ethiopian Empire recognized the Italian possession in the Treaty of Wuchale. In 1890 the Colony of Eritrea was officially founded. In 1936 the region was integrated into Italian East Africa as the Eritrea Governorate, until Italy's loss of the region in 1941.

Seat of power: Asmara

No rulers documented for this era yet.

Culture

• Despite an imposition of racial laws, all urban Eritreans had access to modern sanitation and hospital services.
• The Eritrean Railway was completed to Saati in 1888 and reached Asmara in the highlands in 1911.
• After 1935, art deco architecture was widely employed in Asmara. The Italians designed more than 400 buildings in a construction boom that only halted with Italy's involvement in World War II.
• Thousands of Eritreans were concurrently enlisted in the Italian army, serving during the Italo-Turkish War in Libya as well as the First and Second Italo-Abyssinian Wars.

Picture

The Fiat Tagliero Building is a Futurist-style filling station in Asmara, completed in 1938 and designed by the Italian engineer Giuseppe Pettazzi.

Image: sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0, file

Sources

• Italian Eritrea (Wikipedia)
• Italian Eritrea (Wikidata)
• About the picture (Wikipedia)

Text adapted from the Wikipedia articles listed as sources, CC BY-SA 4.0.