| Summary: | The life and career of Arturo Mezzedimi are the rare tale of an immigrant who conquered the main stage of his adoptive motherland. This paper reconstructs the trajectory of a young technical surveyor who became the semi-official architect of Ethiopia’s last emperor, Haile Selassie. From his apprenticeship in Asmara’s Italian bourgeois society to the construction of “Selassie’s gifts” to Eritrea, Mezzedimi reached the highest levels of achievement, building the Africa Hall and the United Nations headquarters in Africa, and shaping the modern face of Addis Ababa as the moral capital of a continent. The paper reassesses Mezzedimi as a cosmopolitan global expert with a gift for interpreting Haile Selassie’s ambitions to mix European modernity and resilient Ethiopian traditions. This process of cross-pollination led the Italian architect to interpret Ethiopian millennial history and future aspirations while acquiring a self-taught professionalism that allowed him to design and build more than 250 constructions at an impressive pace of hyper-production.
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