Asmara Fiat Tagliero Building

About the Fiat Tagliero Building

Asmara is the capital of Eritrea, a UNESCO World Heritage city celebrated as Africa's modernist capital. The Fiat Tagliero Building, designed by Italian engineer Giuseppe Pettazzi and completed in 1938, is its most iconic landmark — a futurist service station shaped like a soaring airplane, with two cantilevered concrete wings stretching 15 meters on each side with no supporting columns. A masterpiece of Italian Rationalist architecture, the building stands as a symbol of Asmara's unique blend of modernist heritage and highland African identity.

Completed in 1938 to a design by the Italian engineer Giuseppe Pettazzi, this former service station on Asmara's Sematat Avenue became a landmark almost immediately because of its Futurist form: a central tower flanked by two concrete wings roughly thirty metres long that project without visible supports. A widely repeated story holds that colonial officials insisted on props beneath the cantilevers and that Pettazzi forced their removal at gunpoint, or by standing underneath himself; this account is anecdotal and unverified. The building continued as a filling station for decades and now features in Eritrean tourism imagery and stamps, and it stands among the structures cited when UNESCO inscribed "Asmara: A Modernist African City" as a World Heritage site in 2017.