Palacio Barolo

Palacio Barolo is a landmark office building at 1370 Avenida de Mayo in the Monserrat neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, Argentina. The Italian architect Mario Palanti designed it for Luis Barolo, an Italian immigrant who arrived in Argentina in 1890 and made a fortune in knitted fabrics. When it was completed in 1923 it was the tallest building in the city and all of South America, and it kept that record until the Kavanagh Building rose in 1935 to 1936.

Its secret is its plan. The palace was designed around Dante's Divine Comedy. It has 22 floors and is 100 metres tall, one metre for each canto of the poem. A lighthouse on top could be seen across the river in Montevideo, Uruguay, where its twin, Palacio Salvo, was built by the same architect. It was declared a national historic monument in 1997.

A building built like a poem

Palanti shaped the building to follow the three parts of the Divine Comedy. The basement and ground floor stand for hell, floors 1 to 14 for purgatory, and floors 15 to 22 for heaven. The beacon at the top stands for the nine choirs of angels, and the spire ends in a symbol of the Southern Cross constellation. The ornament lines up with the real Southern Cross on 9 July, Argentina's Independence Day.

Inside the lobby

The lobby has a central hall with Latin verse inscriptions and monster statues. It opens out from a central dome into nine vaulted archways, which stand for the nine circles of hell in the Inferno. The first floors have geometric figures, the colours of the Italian flag, and alchemical and Masonic symbols on the walls and floors. The lobby still has old working elevators. Each floor has its own design and ornaments.

Twins and a lighthouse

The light on Palacio Barolo and the one on Palacio Salvo in Montevideo were meant to greet people crossing the Atlantic to the Río de la Plata estuary, like the Pillars of Hercules. One account says the building was meant to hold Dante's ashes, far from a Europe that Barolo feared was heading toward collapse. Today the offices hold travel agencies, a Spanish school for foreigners, a tango clothes shop, and architects, lawyers and designers.

On the globe

The model shows the tower with its lighthouse on top. Look at the decorated crown that rises above the offices.