Today I visited a place I’ve been meaning to see for weeks, Palacio Barolo. As the name suggests, it is one of the many ‘palaces’ from times past that now survive in Buenos Aires in other forms. Some are office buildings, others private residences still and yet others condo buildings. Funnily enough, Palacio Barolo was built in the 1930s as an office building and has never been anything else.
It’s a fascinating place. The original owner and builder was one Luis Barolo, an Italian immigrant who had arrived in Argentina in 1890 and had made a fortune in knitted fabrics. He commissioned an Italian architect, Mario Palanti, to design the building. But there are two interesting facts that influenced the design.
First, Barolo was fascinated by Dante’s Divine Comedy. The building riffs off this work in the number of floors, the number of balconies, and a whole lot of arithmetic that frankly went over my head, but it all ties in with The Divine Comedy.
Second, both Barolo and Palanti were Freemasons, and the building is rife with Masonic symbolism.
The young woman who showed us around, Veronica, was very knowledgeable and interesting. Someone asked her why she dressed as she did, and she explained that this was how the mostly male office workers of the 1930s would have dressed. She looked very cute I must say.
She finished the tour with a visit to an office typical of the time of the building and I couldn’t resist having my photo taken at the desk, although it’s doubtful a woman would ever have sat there!
This is an official photo of the outside of the building. And this is what you see from one of those little round balconies w-a-a-y up at the top of the tower!
After visiting “hell” and “purgatory” by elevator, we then walked up a v-e-r-y narrow spiral staircase to “paradise” at the second top level of balconies, and then on to the lighthouse at the top. It was so blazing hot up there that some of us commented it felt more like hell than paradise!
An identical building was also built in Montevideo, Uruguay, and the original idea was that the two lighthouses would flash directly at each other and meet in the middle of the river. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that Buenos Aires and Montevideo are not opposite each other across the river — so this plan never materialized. Ah yes, South America — you have to love it!
I sat on the sidewalk and sketched the building from the outside. The crick in my neck may take weeks to go away. The image in the corner is the souvenir stamp Veronica gave us at the end of the tour. All in all, it was a fun outing.
I was going to my Spanish lesson from there, but had an hour or so to kill. So I sat at a sidewalk cafe, drinking a lovely, cool Campari and orange juice, and thinking how happy I am to be in Buenos Aires.