Palacio Barolo
Dante-inspired 1923 tower on Avenida de Mayo, once South America's tallest, topped by a working lighthouse.
Commissioned by the textile magnate Luis Barolo and designed by the Italian architect Mario Palanti, the Palacio Barolo was built between 1919 and 1923 on Avenida de Mayo. Its reinforced-concrete frame rose to about 100 metres across twenty-two storeys, making it the tallest building in South America until the Kavanagh was completed in 1935. Palanti also designed the closely related Palacio Salvo in Montevideo, and the two towers face each other across the River Plate.
The building is read as an allegory of Dante's Divine Comedy. Its height in metres matches the poem's hundred cantos, the basement and entrance hall stand for hell, the middle floors for purgatory, and the upper section for paradise, crowned by a rotating lighthouse whose beam was once visible from Uruguay. Declared a National Historic Monument in 1997, it remains an office building, and guided tours take visitors through the hall, the cupola and the lighthouse gallery.
Highlights
- Rotating lighthouse and open gallery with views along Avenida de Mayo
- Layout modelled on the structure of Dante's Divine Comedy
- Latin inscriptions, Art Nouveau lifts and a domed entrance hall
- Twin of Mario Palanti's Palacio Salvo in Montevideo
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