Palacio Barolo is a building on the Avenida de Mayo in Buenos Aires, erected in 1923 on the plan of Dante’s Divine Comedy and crowned by a working lighthouse. It is the Río de la Plata node of Operation Northern Lighthouse and the base of the 1955 Buenos Aires mages’ gesta.
| Type | Place (building) |
| Built | 1923 |
| Location | Avenida de Mayo, Buenos Aires |
| Twin | Palacio Salvo (Montevideo) |
| Spanish entry | Palacio Barolo |
Description
The building is 100 meters tall with twenty-two floors, its whole structure modeled on the Divine Comedy: ground floor and hell below, purgatory in the shaft, paradise at the summit. At the top a real lighthouse casts its beam over the city. Its twin across the estuary is the Palacio Salvo of Montevideo; both are by the architect Mario Palanti, and the two lighthouses face each other, enclosing the Río de la Plata between them.
Node of the lighthouse network
Within Operation Northern Lighthouse — the hidden wiring of lighthouses uncovered by the 1966 Malvinas gesta (campaign-cycle) — the Barolo and the Salvo are the Río de la Plata pair. The network runs from the islands to the Claromecó Lighthouse and up to Cape May and the ice of Thule, and the zirconium travels along it. Claromecó dates from 1922 and the Barolo from 1923, lit one year apart.
Base of the 1955 gesta
In Buenos Aires in 1955 — the September of the bombing of Plaza de Mayo and the fall of Perón — the palace is the base of operations of the mages’ gesta, played with the twenty-two arcana and the dignities of the zodiac. The same tower thus serves two gestas eleven years apart: one uses it as headquarters, the other discovers it as a node.