An Italian officer in colonial Eritrea: administration, ethnography and gender
in the scripts of Alberto Pollera
Alberto Pollera was born in December 1873 in Lucca (Tuscany) to an upper-class
family. After finishing high school at the Military Academy of Modena in 1893, he
volunteered for military service in the newly founded colony named Eritrea, where he
arrived in 1894, and spent the rest of his life there interrupted only by four short ‘home’
leaves. In this regard, his experience is exceptional in that very few Italians actually settled
in the colony until the 1930s. He participated in various military actions until 1903, when
he joined the civil colonial administration and was appointed first residente
(commissioner)5
of the Gash Setit area, in the south-western lowlands. Pollera lived in
Barentu for six years, with his partner Unesc Araia Capte - a young woman from Axum,
Ethiopia, whom he had met during his military service in northern Eritrea - and their two
sons. In 1909 he was appointed commissioner of the Seraye region in the Eritrean
highlands, and rented a house in Asmara for Unesc and their sons, so that the children
could attend the catholic missionary school
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