La Boca and Caminito

Yesterday we took bus 29 from Palermo to La Boca, which is an hour-long, winding, crowded ride through much of the eastern slice of the city that we spend ninety-percent of our time in. We ended up for lunch at what several guidebooks call the best Italian restaurant in the city. We now concur. We then walked through this old Genoese neighborhood, location of the first port (and some say the location of the first, failed Spanish settlement at the beginning of the 16th century) and home to the most touristy spot in the whole city, El Caminito. We all flock there, as if by force of nature, even though advance reports usually tell of a highly touristy, shlocky series souvenir stores and tango dancers hawking a chance to take a photo with a woman in fishnet stockings. The windy street, a hundred yards long, is indeed colorful, a recreation of the painted tin sheets that the immigrants used to make walls for their homes. Throughout the neighborhood, beyond the three blocks of tourist mosh pit, are many more tin houses and a real neighborhood, with a lot less color and a lot more poverty.

But the history of this little block is fascinating. We might think that this is a Disneyland, created recently by the city to bring tourists and their money down to a poor neighborhood. But it is, in fact, something more like an 'authentic' (a dangerous word, I know) effort to proudly save and retell the history of the Genoese community. It was the brainchild of Benito Quinquela Martin, a child of the neighborhood who became its most famous artistic interpreter. His paintings are now housed in a museum he created a top a school he donated to the neighborhood. The street, a former river that led right into La Boca (the mouth of the Riachuelo), became a small rail spur to the main train line of the port. But Quinquela Martin decided, in the 1950s, to restore, or reinvent, the street to celebrate the Genoese and their bright tin homes and the tango that was allegedly first danced here, both inventions born of poverty. The outdoor museum opened in 1959. (The 1926 poem by Gabino Coria Peñalosa and Juan de Dio Filibertothat nostalgically recalls the "little path that time has erased" was really written about a lane in the province of La Rioja, but no matter, when memory calls for poetry as an emulsifier).

I was happy to sit on the rooftop terrace cafe of the PROA Foundation museum at the base of Caminito while the others walked around. But looking out over the fetid swamp that La Boca has become (I mean the body of water that was once the city's first port) has become, I had a fair level of sympathy and admiration for the effort, no matter what it had become.