The Fiat Tagliero Building

Located 750 meters from our Crystal Hotel, built in 1939. The Fiat Tagliero Building in Asmara, capital city of Eritrea, is a Futurist-style service station completed in 1938 and designed by the Italian engineer Giuseppe Pettazzi. When Italian architect Giuseppe Pettazzi inaugurated Eritrea’s plane-shaped Fiat Tagliero service station in 1938, he stunned onlookers by pulling out a gun. There, the story behind Africa’s finest piece of Futurist architecture goes hazy. In one version, Pettazzi stood defiantly on one of his 18m concrete “wings”—used as decorative shades for cars entering the garage—and threatened to kill himself should the structure collapse as wooden supports were pulled away.