Palacio Barolo and Dante's Divine Comedy in Stone

Why is it significant?

Looming dramatically over Avenida de Mayo at number 1370 stands Palacio Barolo, one of the most eccentric, symbolic, and mesmerizing architectural wonders on earth.

Key Facts

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Looming dramatically over Avenida de Mayo at number 1370 stands Palacio Barolo, one of the most eccentric, symbolic, and mesmerizing architectural wonders on earth. Commissioned in 1919 by wealthy Italian textile industrialist Luis Barolo and conceived by visionary Italian architect Mario Palanti, this one-hundred-meter skyscraper was completed in 1923. At the time of its inauguration, it reigned supreme as the tallest building in Latin America and one of the tallest concrete structures in the world. Its exuberant Eclectic facade blends elements of neo-Gothic tracery, neo-Romantic curves, and Indian Hindu temple domes.

Look closely at the overall tripartite composition: the entire skyscraper was mathematically designed as a three-dimensional monument to Dante Alighieri's epic masterpiece, the Divine Comedy.

Palanti and Barolo, both devoted scholars of Dante, feared that Europe's cultural patrimony was on the verge of destruction following the horrors of World War One. They designed this stone colossus to house Dante's sacred ashes, should they need rescue from Italy. The building is divided into three distinct vertical realms: the ground floor and two subterranean basements represent Hell; the first through the fourteenth floors symbolize Purgatory; and the fifteenth through the twenty-second floors embody Paradise. The structure is one hundred meters tall, mirroring the one hundred cantos of Dante's poem. Exactly twenty-two floors reflect the twenty-two stanzas of certain cantos. At the pinnacle of Paradise sits a revolving maritime beacon equipped with a three-hundred-thousand-candela lighthouse lamp, designed to cast its beam across the Río de la Plata to meet its twin tower, the Palacio Salvo in Montevideo.

Looking upward through the central light well at the soaring vaults reveals carved demonic gargoyles and celestial inscriptions intertwined in concrete. Watching the play of sunlight filtering through the upper galleries, you grasp the sheer audacity of an architectural monument built to bridge medieval Florentine literature with modern twentieth-century South American engineering.

Walk west two blocks to enter the open expanse of Plaza del Congreso and locate the bronze figure of The Thinker.