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DAY TWO
| After a late start, you make
your way back to the Plaza de Mayo and
locate the narrowCalle Defensa, main drag
of the newly hip San Telmo neighborhood,
abu ing its southern side. Thewealthywho
populated this part of Buenos Aires in the
19th century fled a er a yellow fever epi-
demic and rebuilt in the northern districts
of Recoleta and Palermo, but now affluent
porteños
are returning, and Defensa has
become a strip of shops and art galleries
reflecting the growing local fashion and
design scenes (Buenos Aires has been
named by UNESCO as one of three Cities
of Design, along withMontreal and Berlin).
Your bellman tipped you off to a great
lunch spot in La Boca, a working-class
neighborhood just south of San Telmo. So
you head to the friendly, family-style
Don Carlos (
1
)
, a classic local joint favored
by Francis Ford Coppola (ask to see the
owner’s photo album, and you’ll note that
the director’s visits have beenmeticulously
chronicled). There’s no menu, but the
food—cooked in an
asado
, or open-mouth
oven—is great. A er asking, “Meat or pasta?”
the owner brings you course a er course,
from
entrée
(which, confusingly, means
FIRST LADY
Eva Perón remains the pride
of the
porteños
Seriously, don’t cry for Evita.
Sixty years after the death
of the Argentine first lady
who soaked the rich to help
the poor—and, not coinciden-
tally, her husband’s political
prospects—Eva “Evita” Perón
is omnipresent in Buenos
Aires. Her story may be a
mix of fact and myth, but it is
indisputably mesmerizing.
Museo Evita tells the
sanitized version preferred by
her family, assembling it with
the help of newsreel footage,
personal mementos and her
famous dresses, shoes and
hats. Housed in an Italian
Renaissance–style mansion
transformed by Evita in 1948
into a shelter for women and
children, the museum also
has an excellent café with a
beautiful garden.
Evita never said the words
ascribed to her by the Andrew
Lloyd Webber musical. But
there is this, from one of the
many fawning plaques placed
on her tomb in Recoleta
Cemetery: “Don’t cry for me,
Argentina,” it reads. “I remain
quite near to you.”
FROCK STAR
The dress that Eva Perón
wore for the cover of her autobiography,
La Razón de Mi Vida
, at Museo Evita
HEMISPHERESMAGAZINE.COM
•
JANUARY 2012
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