The Palacio Barolo’s design was based on the golden section and the golden number and found its inspiration in accordance with the cosmology of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The height of one hundred meters corresponds to the one hundred cantos of Dante’s work, with twenty-two floors, equal to the stanzas of the verses in the Divine Comedy. The building scheme and the Divine Comedy are both divided into three parts: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. The basement and ground floor represent Hell. The upper floors and the cupola (floors one to fourteen) symbolize the seven levels of Purgatory. And the lighthouse (floors fifteen to twenty-two) represents Heaven with its nine angelic choirs. The cupola is inspired by a Hindu temple dedicated to love and symbolizes the union of Dante with his beloved Beatrice.

The stairways contain 1410 steps in Carrera marble which are decorated with ironwork, stained glass, lamps and moldings, while the walls and columns are faced in granite. The crowning moment is the tower, which when viewed from the ground floor, seems to float away from the general mass of the building. This is topped by a cupola which is adorned with much symbolic ornament.

The the narrative inspiration, the controlled proportions of the delicate fluid curves and the precious materials used in this building, inspires an elegance and beauty which characterizes a graceful architectural masterpiece.

The expert at the auction house told me how you are supposed to be holding something that must have broken off a long time ago—a cauldron or a flame—but it simply cannot have been that your maker had wanted you to stay that way. If you had indeed once been holding something, then whoever made you must have placed it in your hands as a trial, a challenge for some future owner to come forward and avail you of your burden. Your arms are far too elegant and relaxed, your posture far too languid and flowing, your limpid expression and rosy flesh far too untroubled to have ever been meant for any sort of exertion. The likes of you are intended for nothing but a soft and diaphanous easiness, a perfect absence of conflict, like the sleeping face of a baby, or the slow caresses of enamored lovers. And if whatever it was you were holding was meant to tell a story, or convey a moral, then it must have weighed you down even more than the few grams of its clay, darkening the crimson of your cape with arduous meanings. Whoever it was, before you came into my possession, that had the grace to free you of your flame or pot, and whatever moral imperatives it came laden with, emptied you of content and set you floating slightly off from the ground, weightless, dancing ever so slightly. The way you are now must be what your maker had intended: a little embodiment of that mindless perfection of ease which we all secretly yearn for, that elegance which comes from the triumph of the body over its troubled interior, that quality we refer to as divinely bestowed since it releases you from… more

Marie Isabel de Monseignat

Adam Nathaniel Furman