The elderly tour guide was adamant. "Please, you must be a true witness. This obelisk has to be returned to Aksum where it belongs. It is our own. It was made here by our ancestors and it tells how strong and clever they were."
No one knows when Axumites first began erecting obelisks, and no one knows how many there are at the last count it was more than 1,300-but they are Berhane Meskai Zelelo's whole world, and he has been showing them to tourists for 40 years.
They are, says Elias Girmas of the Tigray bureau of culture, "pagan monuments". The three most beautiful ones were carved shortly before the Axumite kingdom converted to Christianity in the fourth century. They were cut from single slabs of stone and transported several miles before being erected over the tombs of kings.
They were records of the wealth and might of the kings who ruled over a trading state that stretched as far as Yemen across the Red Sea.
In 1937 the finest of Aksum's three carved obelisks was looted by the invading Italian army under Mussolini. Mussolini was late in acquiring colonies and he told his troops to take Ethiopia "with or without the people".
During the five-year occupation, in which thousands died and much was looted, the Aksum obelisk was shipped to Rome and erected in front of Mussolini's short-lived ministry for Africa, now the site of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. And there it has stayeds despite a UN peace treaty in 1947 which instructed Italy to "restore all works of art . . . and objects of historical value" removed from Ethiopia.
Its return, therefore, unlike that of many other works of art looted during the colonial period, is not just a moral issue: it is provided for in an international treaty. But through lack of political will on the part of the Italians, nothing has been done about it.
Now Ethiopians are saying that time is up. The Return Our Obelisk Committee in Addis Ababa has 13,000 signatures on a petition demanding the obelisk's "immediate restitution" which it will present in due course to the Italian parliament.
Professor Richard Pankhurst, a member of the committee, believes that the time is ripe.
He said: "The recent elections in Italy have brought many anti-fascists to power who regard Mussolini, the looter of the Aksum obelisk, as their own oppressor as well as that of Ethiopians. And very recently the Italian under-secretary for foreign affairs, Rino Serri, made a clear statement saying, 'We will return the Aksum obelisk,' indicating that he wanted a decision not in years but in months."
The head of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in Aksum, Nuburaed Belay, said: "It is not important for "it to stay in Rome. It is not important to the Italian people, because it is not a sign of their civilisation and history. It is merely a sign that they grabbed it from here."
When asked why the Church felt so strongly about a pagan monument the nuburaed replied: "We did not start Christianity without any foundaffon. In the same way as the Old Testament relates to the New Testament, this obelisk is part of our beginnings and it belongs in Aksum."
It is 100 years since the Ethiopians beat the Italians at the battle of Adwa, and 60 years since the Italian army's "revenge" on Ethiopia in its five-year occupation of the country. Now there is a feeling that it is time to settle old scores and that means returning what belongs in Ethiopia.