The Barolo Palace: medieval astronomy in the streets of Buenos Aires

ALEJANDRO GANGUI

CULTURE AND COSMOS

The Sophia Centre for the Study of Cosmology in Culture, University Wales Trinity Saint David, UK.

Lugar: Wales; Año: 2011

1368-6534

Cultural heritage relating to the sky in the form of sundials, old observatories and the like, are commonly found in many cities around the old continent, but hardly in the big, bicentenary, Buenos Aires of today. Ubiquitous references to Dante Alighieri and his poetry are scattered in streets, buildings and monuments all around the Western world. In the city of Buenos Aires, the only street carrying Dante's name is less than three blocks long and, as one might have guessed, just a continuation of Virgilio street. A couple of Italian immigrants -a wealthy businessman and an imaginative architect- foresaw this situation nearly a century ago, and did not save any efforts or money with the aim of getting Dante and his cosmology an appropriate monumental recognition, in reinforced concrete. The Barolo Palace is a unique combination of both astronomy and the worldview displayed in the Divine Comedy, Dante's poetic masterpiece. Although the links of the Palace's main architectural structure with the three realms of the Comedy have been studied in the past, its unique astronomical flavor has not been sufficiently emphasized yet. The word of God, as interpreted by the Fathers of the Church in Sacred Scripture, Aristotle's physics and Ptolemy's astronomy, all beautifully converge in Dante's verses, and the Barolo Palace is no exception to this.