Cambridge, March 20, 2013
A while ago I wrote a little note about the Barolo Palace, a
building in Buenos Aires allegedly built to house Dante's ashes and designed based on the Divine Comedy
Dietrich Neumann--the architecture historian at Brown University, who's writing a book about Mario Palanti (the architect of the
Barolo)--tells me that there's absolutely no truth to the Dante story,
only to add "... but such fun that it has found its way into countless
guidebooks and even into the guided tours of the building."
Now I really want to know how the story came about. It must have started somehow, and
somebody must have "read" the building with painstaking care in order
to map the poem onto it. Almost as
good a story, don't you think? Maybe
even better. As the Italians like
to say, "si non e vero e ben trovato" (if it's not truth, it's well
made up.) And it this case the
story would be true, I mean, the story of making up the story of Barolo and
Dante's ashes, and how it got to be accepted as a true story.
But why stop there? Think about the possibilities. One could take a building and tell how it originated in this
or that book. You could even do it
the other way around, with buildings giving origin to books... Well, yes, of course, Borges, always Borges, isn't that exactly what he does when he goes to see the Aleph in the basement under the dining room of Beatriz Viterbo's house on Garay Street?
The book begetting the building. The building begetting the
book. Take that one, Victor Hugo...
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