Confeitaria Rocco, Confectionery store and architectural structure in Centro, Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Confeitaria Rocco is a four-story structure at the corner of Riachuelo and Dr. Flores streets, featuring decorative Atlas sculptures and iron beams throughout its construction. The building uses brick masonry combined with wrought iron supports that give it structural distinction.
Nicolau Rocco, an Italian who had worked at El Molino confectionery in Buenos Aires, founded Confeitaria Sul-América in Porto Alegre in 1892. In 1910 he commissioned architect Salvador Lambertini to build this larger premises; Lambertini died before completion, and Manoel Barbosa Assumpção Itaqui supervised the work, inaugurated on 20 September 1912. The city listed the building in 1997.
The ballroom on the second floor hosted banquets and aristocratic balls, and several societies were founded there. Its regulars included Getúlio Vargas, Eurico Gaspar Dutra, Góes Monteiro, Daltro Filho and writer Mário de Andrade. The building's name comes from its founder, the Italian confectioner Nicolau Rocco.
This location is situated at a central intersection in Porto Alegre's downtown area and is easy to reach. The original layout featured a candy factory in the basement level and a public confectionery shop on the ground floor, showing how production and sales were organized.
Six Atlas figures, not four, support the balcony: three young ones stand for America and Plenty, three old ones for Europe and Abundance, each holding a basket of local fruit. Above them, the pediment group by Frederico Pellarin shows a female figure inside a lyre flanked by two children, an allusion to music.
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