Post by Grubb.
The downtown center of Mendoza, a twenty-five minute walk from where we’re staying, has a central plaza, Plaza Independencia, and four surrounding plazas equidistantly apart.
Square San Martin honors the general who successfully liberated Argentina, Chile, and Peru from Spain. As far as national heroes go, he’s quite the dude. No one splashes his statue with red paint.
On his horse, he points to the west where he is set to liberate Chile and Peru.
Square Chile was built to reinforce the idea that relations between Argentina and its neighbor were good especially after Chile offered aid to rebuild the city after the devastating 1861 earthquake. A prominent statue in the square shows San Martin with his arm around the shoulders of Bernardo O’Higgins, the Chilean general who assisted San Martin in his campaign.
Square Italia is another example of Argentina paying tribute to the immigrant community that transformed the country. Their cultural influence is quite remarkable. Of the European diaspora in the late nineteenth century that ended up in Argentina, the Italians seem to have joined the Spanish in making up the Argentinian identity. The lead prosecutor inveighing against the Argentinian generals during their trial in 1985 ended his final remarks with a quote from Dante’s “Inferno”.
There is a marvelous fountain in this park where Charon is ready to ferry Dante across Acheron into the rings of hell. Beatrice is cantilevered up above the circles where different sinners are suffering. A recent TripAdvisor review from a tourist says, “It is ugly, scary to children, and an overall open wound that will never heal…” One can only hope. When it comes to scaring children, I was thinking of Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Novona in Rome. A fountain that disturbs not only water but the people looking at it is my kind of fountain.
Square España has colorfully designed benches and pathways inlaid with ceramic tile foregrounding a curved wall divided into murals of conquest. Christopher Colón sails the ocean, meets the natives, gauchos start taming the land. Circles of hell turned into the glossy tile work of history. Not so scary to children. Until they grow up.
One of the clever aspects of a square like Square España is that Mendoza got Spain to pay for the tile work. And I have to say the benches were not only beautiful, but sweet to sit on.
When we returned to Plaza Independencia, there was a woman balanced inside a large hula hoop doing a twisting dance. It made my joints ache just to look at her.
