The thing about the author’s stairs The little Prince It’s not a story. Between marble columns with pretensions of eternal and closed premises, the Roveran Passagestill hit as it is since the end of the pandemic and its restrictions, allows us to leave behind (at least for a little while) the scenario of hustle and bustle, poverty and tourismlocated at 500 Mayo Avenue, the heart of downtown Buenos Aires.
It is there that one can evoke the author of that book, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in the 1930s, rushing up the stairs to fetch letters from the National Airline Company and take them to the South in his monoplane.
The Roverano was designed in the years in which the City of Buenos Aires was transformed into metropolis and it can also remind us of part of that. The brothers Ángel and Pascual Roverano built in 1878 a building to rent in Victoria – today Yrigoyen –. A decade later, when they began to lay out Avenida de Mayo and expropriate buildings to demolish them, they gave up 135 m2 and asked to compensate their tenants. In 1912, the architect Eugenio Gantner redesigned the place: basement (which incorporated a still “secret” entrance to subway A), 7 floors and a neoclassical façade, Parisian type, for the old fund, that is, the current Avenue. And six years later they inaugurated it.
The neighborhoods of Buenos Aires also have their legends. Mouth exceed those of Caminito and the Bombonera. There is a building, right at the intersection of Brown with Wenceslao Villafañe and Benito Pérez Galdós, with the air of a little princess castle. However, it is known as the “ghost tower”.
One of the most popular versions of the myth that explains this nickname is the one that says that its owner, María Luisa Auvert Arnaud, a rancher from Rauch, Province of Buenos Aires, bought plants to decorate her in Spain that had hallucinogenic mushrooms and goblins so harmful that she He returned to the field. The painter Clementina then became her tenant and those goblins forced her to kill herself. But the artist’s soul was trapped there, wandering…
The truth is much more interesting. The building is an icon of the Galician architect Guillermo Alvarez, pioneer of modernism in Capital. Auvert Arnaud asked him to make his Buenos Aires house have Catalan influences, like his ancestors. That is why the decoration with flowers, curves and battlements brings distant echoes of the movement led by Antonio Gaudí, the creator of the Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona.
A few quick turns through memories, however small they may seem, always wake us up. When it’s dark, they help to shed light and may even provide comfort.
When I pass by the Roverano I also usually evoke quotes from The little Prince that help me look at it better. That “it was nothing more than a fox similar to a hundred thousand. But I made it my friend and now it is unique in the world”. An idea that could well be applied to all cities and their heritage. Because you cannot love what you do not know. And even less, take care of it.
