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BAROLO Palace
Location:
Av. De Mayo 1370 & H. Yrigoyen 1371 – Montserrat
During the 1910s. two people dreamed of bringing poet Dante Alighieri´s
ashes to Buenos Aires: the industrialist Luis Barolo (1869-1922) and the
architect Mario Palanti (1885-1979). For this purpose they built a
sanctuary on 1300 Av. De Mayo.
The
Barolo Palace was the highest city building before the Kavanagh was
built in 1935. It has a height of 100 metres ending on the lantern which
used to have 300.000 bulbs. On September 14 1923 it transmitted with its
lights the result of the boxing bout between Firpo and Dempsey.
Built
in an architectural style combining references to Venetian gothic and
religious Indian architecture, the Barolo Palace surprised people from
the very beginning. The Argentine historian Carlos Hilger asserts that
this is the major example of “esoteric” architecture from the beginning
the 20th. Century.
The
building has plenty of references to Dante. The bulbs in the cupola
represent the nine angelical choirs and the mystical rose. In the cupola
we find the Southern Cross which can be seen aligned with the axis of
the Barolo Palace during the first days of June at 19.45 hs.
The
general division of the building and the poem is done in three parts:
Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. The ground floor is Hell, the first 14
floors are Purgatory, and following floors are Paradise and the cupola
represents God.
The
number of Hell hierarchies is nine, and nine are the arches of access to
the building which represent initiation steps. Each arch has Latin
phrases taken from nine different works from the Bible to Virgil. The
cupola resembles that of the Budanishar Hindu temple dedicated to Tantra
“representing the union between Dante and Beatrice.
The
songs from Dante´s work are a hundred just as the height of the building
is a 100 mts. The majority of songs in the poem have eleven or twenty
two stanzas; the building has eleven modules per front, and twenty two
modules per block. The height is twenty two floors. This set of numbers
represents the circle which was, to Dante the perfect figure.
The Barolo Palace has been Historical National Monument since 1997.
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