ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the description and composition of the East African landscape when it became a condition of an Italian colonial spatial history. It explores how the ground of Eritrea and the city of Asmara were mapped and visually mastered within these narratives. The chapter identifies the originary modern spaces of the colony that endured among rhetorical postures made by successive colonial administrations. It describes how Asmara was constituted first in text and then became an adaptable setting for the making of a colonial and later Imperial city. The chapter interrogates the social, geographic, and representational mechanisms that generated Italian colonial space in Eritrea. It illustrates how the assent or rejection of specific components within narratives of form, of landscapes, eventually affected the building of divergent modern visions in Asmara. The colonial government installed first in Massawa and later transferred to Asmara will bring about manifestly different social and physical changes to the imaging of colonial Eritrea.
