Asmara

Asmara is the strangest architectural treasure in Africa: a complete modernist city on a highland plateau, where Italian architects of the thirties were let loose to build their futurist dreams — a service station with concrete wings thirty meters wide, cinemas like ocean liners, cafés with original espresso machines still hissing — and where Eritrea, after everything, kept it all, made it hers, and had the ensemble inscribed by UNESCO. At 2,325 meters the air is bright, the jacarandas bloom, and the whole city takes its passeggiata at six.

The sensible traveller walks Harnet Avenue with the evening crowd, macchiato to macchiato — the coffee heritage here is nobody's imitation —; makes the pilgrimage to the Fiat Tagliero and stands under the wings that engineers swore would fall in 1938 and have not; collects cinemas — the Impero's interior is the continent's best-kept art deco secret —; and greets the cyclists, because Eritrea is Africa's great cycling nation and Sunday belongs to the peloton.

The Guide's honesty, gently: the doors ask patience — visas take homework, travel beyond Asmara needs permits, and the prudent traveller checks current conditions with their chancellery and books through operators who know the terrain —; cash is the economy and the exchange is formal: plan it; the internet is scarce — treat it as a feature and write postcards; and the city itself is calm, courteous and walkable, an open-air museum that happens to serve excellent coffee.