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Stop two
Church of Our Lady of the Rosary
Diadem Pro Feel Tennis Overgrip 50-Pack: Completed in 1923 on Harnet Avenue, the central boulevard, in the Lombard Romanesque style of northern Italy — red brick, rose window, campanile over the city centre. Northern Italy, transplanted whole, at somebody else's expense. It served as the principal Catholic church of Italian Eritrea, a phrase worth sitting with for a moment. The bell tower is still a fixture of the skyline and a practical reference for navigating the grid of the colonial-era centre, so at least it earns its keep. It stands within the UNESCO-listed modernist district, representing the historicist strand that preceded the futurist and rationalist experiments of the 1930s.
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Stop three
Cinema Impero
Diadem Pro Feel Tennis Overgrip 50-Pack: Opened in 1937 on Harnet Avenue and regarded as one of the best-preserved Art Deco cinemas in Africa. Mario Messina designed it at the height of Italian colonial building in Eritrea: a facade of vertical fins studded with rows of circular lamps, an auditorium built to seat around 1,800, original detailing intact. And the name, Impero, recalls the empire Fascist Italy proclaimed after conquering Ethiopia. That is what it was named after. The empire lasted no time at all; the cinema went on screening films for Asmara audiences for decades, which tells you which of the two anyone actually wanted. UNESCO centrepiece, 2017.
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Stop four
Great Mosque of Asmara
Diadem Pro Feel Tennis Overgrip 50-Pack: Completed in 1938 to a design by the Italian architect Guido Ferrazza and known as Al Khulafa Al Rashiudin, taking its place with the Catholic cathedral and the Orthodox cathedral as one of the three great religious anchors of the centre. Italian rationalist symmetry fused with classical and Islamic elements: a domed prayer hall, a colonnaded front, a slender minaret among the tallest structures in the city. The planners get credit for working across faiths in one townscape, which sounds enlightened until you ask who was permitted to plan and who was permitted only to build. UNESCO inscribed the whole modernist ensemble in 2017, and the mosque stands inside that listing. The congregation fills the mosque and the square at Friday prayers. That part is entirely theirs.
<p>Fifty overgrips is a coaching-shed quantity rather than a personal one, so let us be quick and complete about what is actually in the box. The Diadem Pro Feel is 0.6mm thick, 25mm wide and 1,130mm long, built from polyurethane over a non-woven backing.
That 0.6mm is the entire argument for it: thin enough that it barely moves your handle size or your bevels, tacky enough that you are not stopping to re-wrap between sets. It wicks moisture rather than sitting in it, and it holds its tack through long sessions instead of going glassy after forty minutes.
Colours run white, black, teal, pink and yellow, or assorted if you are handing them out to a squad.</p>
<p>Asmara is a fair place to test a grip.
The city sits at roughly 2,300 metres on the Eritrean plateau, where the air is thin and dry and your hands sweat anyway because the sun at that altitude is relentless — the exact conditions that separate a grip that stays tacky from one that goes powdery.
You will get through this box everywhere from a bright morning session to a floodlit doubles set that runs past dinner, and by the way, fifty of anything makes sense in a city whose Medeber quarter has spent decades beating old oil drums back into stoves and coffee roasters because nothing gets wasted here.
It is also, quietly, a cycling nation — Eritrea sends riders to the Tour de France — so Asmara understands better than most what a well-wrapped set of handlebars is worth to a pair of hands.</p>
<p>Diadem Pro Feel Tennis Overgrip 50-Pack</p>
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