Palacio Barolo

Palacio Barolo is the most literary building in the Americas: a 1923 office palace on Avenida de Mayo designed, floor by floor, as Dante's Divine Comedy. The architect Mario Palanti and his patron, textile magnate Luis Barolo, were Italian immigrants convinced Europe would destroy itself and Dante's ashes would need a safer monument — so they built one, one hundred metres tall (Dante's hundred cantos), twenty-two floors in three zones: Hell in the lobby and basements (nine vaulted bays for nine circles, fire-breathing dragon lamps, demons in the bronzework), Purgatory through the office floors as the building narrows and lightens, and Paradise at the summit — a working lighthouse, 300,000 candlepower, aligned so that on certain July nights the Southern Cross constellation stands directly above it. It was the tallest building in South America when it opened, and it remains the strangest.

The guided tour is the only way up, and it's a good one: guides decode the Masonic-Dantean symbolism (Palanti embedded it thick — Latin inscriptions, the golden section, condors and serpents in the ironwork), ride you up in the original open-cage wooden elevators through Purgatory's tiled corridors, and deliver you to the lighthouse dome for the payoff — a 360-degree view down the Parisian sweep of Avenida de Mayo to the Congress dome one way and the Casa Rosada the other, the best vantage in the historic centre. The building still works as offices — tango tailors, Spanish teachers, notaries behind pebbled-glass doors — which keeps it alive rather than embalmed; the evening tours end with the lighthouse lit and the avenue glowing below, and some run a wine glass on the terrace into the bargain.

Craft: book the English-language slot ahead (small groups, they cap), wear shoes for stairs — the last stretch into the lighthouse is a tight spiral — and note the twin detail for the ride home: Palanti built a sister building, Palacio Salvo, across the river in Montevideo, and the two lighthouses were meant to blink at each other across the Río de la Plata. Pair the visit with Café Tortoni three blocks up the avenue and the Plaza de Mayo circuit — this is the spine of oldest Buenos Aires, and Barolo is its strangest vertebra.