The new Europe

Buenos Aires looks like the city every other longs to be.

Graceful Old-World buildings line the streets; trees with roots so big they’re used for benches sink contentedly into park meadows. Vendors squeeze fresh orange juice for thirsty strollers, and professional dancers gyrate through snappy street tangos as though electrically charged.

The Avenida 9 de Julio is silver under the autumn sun. Crowds are smiling, lovers nuzzling, cameras snapping the crowd into digital immortality around its Obelisk plaza.

Of four days in Argentina’s striking first city, the overriding memory is that you need to stay four more. The biographies of modern artists whose works hang in its milk-carton of a museum, MALBA, say the same thing: They’re a litany of talented people who came here and never left.

As in most capitals, there is blood on the pages of its history. (See side notes: “Know before you go”) The country’s economy has been a mine field, and as recently as 2002 the currency went into a nearly fatal nosedive.

Only in the last three years has a multiparty democracy replaced the regimes that alternately patronized and brutalized Argentina’s people. The new order has a few chin whiskers, of course. Residents are now obliged to vote; even a driver’s license requires one’s poll receipt.

Still, the city seems to be in careful ascendancy. As it navigates a higher road over political emotions and government manipulation, Buenos Aires also has emerged as an oasis where the U.S. dollar has value and where tourism hasn’t snuffed out its own welcome.

The best things in the city, of course, are free. Strolling the neighborhoods is its own entertainment, with 48 subcities and hundreds of ethnic cultures within the capital. Communities as diverse as Korean, Chinese, Croatian, Italian, German and Irish are here, each with some page of history behind their flight to a city of moderate climate and business opportunity.

Argentina’s own six indigenous peoples migrate for seasonal work or to sell their crafts.

Taken with the suburban communities, they create a spicy stew of 13.8 million people, the world’s eighth largest. Only in Buenos Aires can you can eat Japanese sushi in a Korean-run restaurant, buy Wichi Indian musical instruments at spontaneously blooming craft shows and enjoy inky cortado — espresso with a shot of milk — in a wood-paneled coffee house left over from British influence.

Buenos Aires is, with the usual precautions about theft and dark streets, a safe city to roam, too. Few neighborhoods are not for night absorption, One of them is the tempting Boca, with its Kool-Aid colored apartment houses and slightly rowdy, day-trip population.

“That is a place for lunch, not dinner,” a tour guide diplomatically told us.

If you have dancing feet, take them instead to Palermo Soho, one of the new young-professional neighborhoods, or to Puerto Madero, where dockside warehouses have been transformed into nightclubs.

The Recoleta, where we stayed, was addictive, a cocktail of classical French architecture, Italian food and Spanish dining habits. Recoleta had a neighborhood feel: Hotels, apartments, restaurants, greengrocers and hardware microstores were clustered along tree-lined walks. Families pushed strollers, while paseaperros, professional dog walkers, pulled their pooches, managing as many as 10 in leashed constitutionals.

Although talent should move you to throw a few pesos, the abundant street entertainment is free, and the balmy autumn days of April were the perfect time to sample it. Marionettes wiggled their hips to Chuck Berry tunes along the pedestrians-only Calle Florida, where we further amused ourselves explaining to inquiring shop owners that WE were Floridians.

Among the crusty Spanish colonial buildings of San Telmo, a middle-aged woman nesting in a doorstep played the drums, tossing and catching her sticks. In the Recoleta park was a performer in his mid-70s. A gently squared package of dark suit, snappy fedora and polished black shoes, he performed as if for himself, taking elegant steps to the passionate music oozing from a portable stereo. As his feet prowled an invisible dance floor, he sang the wistful lyrics of tango.

For higher culture, Teatro Colon, one of the top three acoustical halls in the world, was first choice. It’s an amazing building, so renowned that tours in either English or Spanish require reservations.

For 7 pesos ($2.40 U.S.) you’re invited into its roomy boxes, the set building shop, rehearsal rooms and wardrobe halls, much of it underneath the traffic-laden boulevard outside. (It ends with a five-story stair climb back to the lobby; people with mobility problems should pass on this tour.) Our insiders’ knowledge of how it was created, made the stereo-perfect production of “Don Giovanni” that night all the more memorable.

Tango shows are everywhere. Actually, tango art, tango students, singers of music written as tango and tango tours are everywhere. Serious students can move among milongas, dance events, on specially guided vacations. Novices like us can benefit from my brother-in-law’s research and dine at Chiquin, one of the oldest halls in the city, where the food and wine way outshine the usual dinner-theater fare and the rich show features both tango and ethnic music.

Athletic and precise, tango isn’t simply sex in evening dress, as anyone who has swung their knee the wrong way during a turn can tell you. With its graceful dives and artfully timed kicks, tango evolved from the libidinous diversion of dockworkers to a provincial hallmark, fitting for a city whose residents call themselves “portenos“ (port people).

Tango admirers will want to book a tour of the Cementerio Chacarita, the preferred resting place of music and dance stars. Argentina’s “tango king,” Carlos Gardel, is interred beneath a marble likeness that still wears live red carnations from adoring fans. They also prop a lighted cigarette, Gardel’s trademark, between its fingers.

We went the other direction, however, to visit the grave of Eva Peron in Cementerio de la Recoleta (section 57, in the Duarte family plot). If you have a photo op of bouquets and notes and flowers in mind, don’t visit on Sunday morning, after all the monuments have been cleared of fading blooms. Two carnations and a friendly cat were the only adornments this particular day, but tour groups with reinforcement nosegays were on the way as we left.

The entire Recoleta cemetery is full of national heroes and villains, a stone and marble city of vivid, imaginative sculpture.

Outside, on the weekend, artisans set up booths filled with cottage-industry jewelry, knitwear, toys and Argentina’s famous leather goods. For $5 U.S., you can choose the leather and the buckle you want, and a craftsman will cut it to size.

Natives know where the best bargains on leather are, but for jackets it’s hard to resist the the shops on Calle Florida. You can have a rack jacket tailored to you overnight for $70 U.S. Shoppers like me will only leave Buenos Aires reluctantly.

The Plaza de Mayo is an obligatory destination for any visitor who has an idea of Argentina’s history. Don’t get comfortable; here 300 bystanders were mowed down in the 1955 military strafing that toppled Juan Peron’s administration. Here also was the public grieving place for mothers whose children disappeared during the horrific "National Reorganization Process" instituted by the military juntas of the 1970s.

Wearing white headscarves and holding photos of those who never came home, these women quietly galvanized world opinion against Argentina’s dictatorship by their appearances. In the brutality of the time, many of them paid for this courage with their lives. They still march at 3:30 p.m. Thursdays around the Plaza de Mayo; more than 9,0000 of those who disappeared have never been accounted for.

Here, too, is the Casa Rosada balcony where the charismatic Eva Peron, immortalized herself, rallied the working masses for her husband, Juan.

Democracy has turned the area around the Casa Rosada into a haven for protesters over various causes. Orange-vested police and protestors. who camp out with blue-and-white national flags are a common sight.

The day we were there, so were angry veterans from Argentina’s 1982 invasion of the islands known as the Malvinas or the Falklands, depending on which country you supported in that war. The young recruits who were disabled in that fiasco were receiving 400-peso pensions that had shriveled to a quarter of their value in the 2002 monetary crisis. A recent raise was still not making ends meet.

“It’s the veterans. They’re always protesting,” a young man told us, shrugging.

The fact that he could be blasé about it, and the fact that the protesters felt safe to do it, can only be a good sign in Buenos Aires.

Getting there

You can fly from Naples or Fort Myers to depart via Atlanta via Delta; from Fort Myers, via Houston on Continental; or from Miami via American Airlines. Prices: $850 to $1,100

Getting around

Because of its size, visitors are lucky there’s no obsession with cars in Buenos Aires. You can ride the Subte (subway) for 70 centavos (about 25 cents U.S.). A “guia T,” the bus guide available at most newsstands, may help you get cheaply closer to the exact spot you want than the Subte, which has no outer cross lines serving the spokes of its layout. Fares are like those of the Subte.

Longer drives make a taxi a good investment for groups. When one will spirit your party to the airport from the Recoleta for about $15 U.S. (45 pesos with a 7-peso tip), there was no incentive for two of us spend $18 for the Manuel Tienda Leon shuttle buses, although a single person will find its $9 fares to various spots from Ezeiza irresistible . (The fare itself is about 23 pesos ($7 U.S.); value-added IVA taxes hike many prices.) Ask taxi drivers about fares before you hop in.

— www.subte.com.ar/contenido/home.asp (Spanish language)

— www.easybuenosairescity.com/citytransportation.htm#Colectivos; this is an independent Web site on transportation

— www.tiendaleon.com.ar/

Dining

Food — eclectic and bargain-priced — gets special affection in Buenos Aires. Its 19th-century Italian heritage demands its delicatessen counters bulge with cheese, peppery vegetable salads and salamis. Pampas-fed Argentinean beef is a staple of nearly every dining spot, sending out aromatic fingers of wood-grilling and spice dustings. The ubiquitous empanadas hide fillings of ham and cheese, chard soufflé, corn or mushrooms inside their flaky crusts.

Yerba mate, a loose tea beverage sipped through silver straws, commands its own special utensils. We opted, however, for cafe media, North American-size cups of the hair-curling torrado (sugar-roasted) coffee with a generous splash of leche.

Every cuisine gets respect. We loaded our plates again and again at Los Sabios, a vegetarian buffet with with everything from soufflés to stir-fries to custardy desserts and cookies. Portenos (the nickname of residents) are such foodies there’s a Web site devoted to where to find good sushi. We loved the sea-fresh sushi at Haru, which turns out plump rolls with chef-created dipping sauces. For Italian food, there are too many great choices to count.

— Haru Japanese Restaurant, Av. Rivadavia 3324; phone 4861-6828; www.haru.com.ar

—Los Sabios Restaurante Vegetariano, Av. Corrientes 3733-1194 Cap. Fed; phone 4864-4407

Museums and cultural life

There are too many to count. We had time for only the tour of Colon Teatro and a visit to MALBA, the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires.

For the former, ask for the English-language tours, and be ready to walk. Teatro Colon, maddeningly, does not have an offsite ticket-purchasing site for performances; you must have a friend, research a ticket-buying service or be willing to stand in line.

For the latter, ask for the English-language floor guide to the latter and be ready to spend a lot of time being fascinated by 20th-century icons like Xul Solar (to whom an entire museum is dedicated elsewhere in the city).

— MALBA; www.malba.org.ar

— www.teatrocolon.org.ar

— www.chiquin.com.html. The restaurant is near the Avenida de 9 Julio. Call for reservations; dinner and tango-music show are about $60 U.S., which includes wine.

Hotels

There are thousands here, and your choice depends on how many creature comforts you want and where you want to stay. Basic rooms can be had as cheaply as $20; we stayed for barely more than $60 a night at the Ayacucho Palace Hotel, but racked up money hooking to the hotel’s internet — next time we’ll go to the internet cafe across the street, where less than $1 U.S. can buy an hour’s time.

Language

Spanish is the official language. However, in Buenos Aires especially a form of Castilian is spoken that turns double ls and ys into the sound “sh”; this made our hotel, the Ayacucho, become the Ashacucho in conversation. Portenos also use the Italian “ciao” instead of “Hasta la vista“ for quick farewells.

Know before you go

-There is an $18 U.S. departure tax from Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires. It can be paid in U.S. or Argentinean currency (about 54 pesos)

— Trading-partner currency crises, corrupt governments and shaky resurrection plans from the International Monetary Fund have extracted more pounds of flesh than a body without such a robust culture and spirited people could bear. Here are a few history sources from various viewpoints:

— www.yendor.com/vanished; click on the English-language version

— www.internationalmonetaryfund.org/external/np/sec/pn/2004/pn0426.htm

MSN Encarta and Wikipedia also have Web pages devoted to Argentina’s history.

For an idea of the 1973-1982 clandestine torture prisons, here are two unnerving resources:

— “The Official Story,” directed by Luis Penzo (1986 Academy Award winner, best foreign-language film). It’s available at the Collier County Public Library.

— “That Inferno: Conversations with Five Women Survivors of an Argentine Torture Camp,” by Munú Actis, Cristina Aldini, Liliana Gardella, Miriam Lewin, and Elisa Tokar; translated by Gretta Siebentritt (Vanderbilt University Press; $27.95)