El Ateneo Grand Splendid
Walk through the door on Santa Fe Avenue and you are standing in a theatre. El Ateneo Grand Splendid opened in May 1919 as the Teatro Gran Splendid, designed by the architects Peró and Torres Armengol for the impresario Max Glücksmann. Look up: the ceiling frescoes are by the Italian painter Nazareno Orlandi, and the caryatids are by the sculptor Troiano Troiani, whose work also decorates the cornice of the city legislature.
The hall once held 1,050 seats, and tango names such as Carlos Gardel, Francisco Canaro, Roberto Firpo and Ignacio Corsini performed on its stage. In 1924 Glücksmann started Radio Splendid, broadcasting from the building, and his record company Nacional Odeón made some of the early recordings of the great tango singers of the day. By the late 1920s the theatre had become a cinema, and in 1929 it showed the first sound films presented in Argentina.
The bookshop came much later. Grupo Ilhsa leased the building in 2000, the architect Fernando Manzone led the conversion, and shelves took the place of the cinema seats. The ceiling, the carvings, the crimson stage curtains and the auditorium lighting stayed. You can sit and read in the old theatre boxes, and the café is at the back of what was once the stage. More than a million people come through the doors each year; The Guardian ranked it the second most beautiful bookshop in the world in 2008, and National Geographic named it the most beautiful in 2019.
Entry is free, so half an hour here costs you nothing but time, even if you leave without a book. From the bookshop it is 1780 m, about 24 minutes on foot, to the giant steel flower in United Nations Square.
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