The old guard, now in their sixties and seventies, lumber into the lobby of the Embasoira Hotel in Asmera to meet and chat. Some are educated in selective universities like the University of Michigan and UC Berkeley. They are men and women who have devoted their skills and time to the liberation struggle of Eritrea. They wrote their doctoral dissertations and graduate theses with the independence of Eritrea in mind.

“My doctoral dissertation was on the ‘if and when liberation comes to Eritrea’,” says one of them, whom everyone addresses as ‘doctor,’ to a group sitting and sipping macchiatos in the vestibule of the modern hotel.

While the conversation blossoms, a niece of the President of Eritrea, Issayas Afeworki, emerges from the restaurant talking to a friend and moves past the group after a brief exchange of greetings.

“They are walking home. You see, she is safe to walk at this time of the evening, and no one will accost her,” says the doctor to reassure a newcomer to the group.

It is not too hard to imagine the streets of Asmera as a safe place by day or night. Except for a few traffic police that stand in the squares, there are no police who patrol the streets. Gone are the club-wielding regulation enforcers that roam the streets; the machine gun-toting constabularies that patrol the squares and walkways; and the federal police who stand guard behind high-powered guns mounted on the roofs of Toyota trucks throughout Addis Abeba.

A visit to Asmera inevitably evokes a comparison between this petite highland city and the sprawling metropolis of Addis Abeba. This is true especially among those who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies, where a debate raged with claims and counterclaims as to which city was more modern. The two sister capitals molded by European, particularly Italian, influence, share a common history and development.

Founded within a few years of each other at the turn of the last century, Asmera becomes the elder when colonial Italy built a modern city enclave on an endogenous mountain plateau. Addis Abeba, well over a thousand miles to the south, will soon rise after Emperor Menelik II settles his capital on one of the terraced plains in central Ethiopia.

During the go-go days of the sixties, the urbanites of Addis Abeba considered their city more modern, fashionable, chic, sophisticated and cosmopolitan than Asmera - a view fiercely challenged by the townies to the north. Some five decades later, after Piassa, Kazanchis and Casa Popolare fell to the wrecking balls of municipal authorities, the comparison to these Italian-built quarters with well-preserved neighbourhoods like Combishtato, Caravanseraglio, and Beza Bandain in Asmara peters out.

While Addis Abeba has trashed its historical buildings and infrastructure, Asmera has preserved them. Asmera, which once adopted the administrative municipal laws of the city of Milan, still operates and functions like any modern city, while Addis Abeba wallows in near chaos.

Outside the city of Asmera, the dwellings are mostly modest stone and concrete shacks common in the undeveloped world.