He wanted to be a priest but ended his ecclesiastical career when love crossed his path. He defines himself as a “restorer and painter” and for decades his task has been to revive such emblematic buildings as the former Central Post Office, the Atlanta stadium and several embassies. He is the man behind the eternally postponed return of the stores harrods. Beauty, grandfather and business.
“Piccolo? whatBeloved Angel Piccolo? No, Angel died. I am his brother, his twin. With whom do I have the pleasure? ”, She is heard on the other side of the line while there is a heart that stops beating. Then the laugh. “No, lie, it’s me,” says a playful voice, happy with the success of his first trick: pretending to be dead. Later, with the days – with a first coffee of almost three hours in Florida Garden, with two more hours of talk in the garden of the English Tobacco Shop, another of the places that he helped to restore and where he feels at home, and with many more conversations via Whatsapp that almost hagiographic name (an Angel who is also loved and small) becomes an elegant and restless little man. On the first date he shows up in a suit and hat, on the second in a suit and hat. He carefully combines shoes, shirts and ties. And he arrives at the first meeting with a huge folder where, he clarifies, “there is what I do, what I know how to do, all the places where I worked: the French embassy, all that.” He has small eyes, a mixture of gray and light blue, and a strange mood that lights up every once in a while, as if they were spark plugs.
News: And why isn’t all this on the web? Why is it so hard to get to you?
Beloved Angel Piccolo: It was, it was on the internet, but I took it out. I took it out because they drove me crazy, they called me from all sides, permanently. Now I’m going to put it on the Internet again. Anyway, at that time I was going to retire ”.
News: You will never retire.
Piccolo: No, but at that moment I didn’t want to know anything else either. She had looked bad after having done Retirement and Constitution. I lost twenty-two million pesos. My wife, my sister, my father, they told me that there was inflation, that I shouldn’t get involved, but I didn’t listen to them. Because I didn’t care about the money but the work. I did the Casa Rosada, the Central Post Office, I painted the fields of Vélez, All Boys, Platense…
News: Painting or restoration work?
Piccolo: Restoration and painting. Because to be a restorer you have to have all of this (opens the folder, shows his collection of diplomas): I went to the Gálvez School of Arts and Crafts, courses, everything. I was in Barcelona, I did three doctorates.
News: In what, specifically?
Piccolo: In everything that is art. Later, the Church did not want to let me leave.
News: And how was that? Did they want to form it?
Piccolo: The Church wanted to form me and it formed me. If I even restored the Episcopate building! But I got angry. I told them: “If I don’t do all the work myself, I’m leaving.” And I left. They had to pick me up at my house in Pinamar.
News: You are one of wanting to control absolutely everything in each work, right?
Piccolo: And that’s the bad. What happens is that I was always a capo. I was a little wolf (before being a Boy Scout) and then I was a Boy Scout boss. And who was always in charge? I! I was born on March 14. The same day as Einstein.
News: And why did it come out like this? Are you an only child?
Piccolo: No, I had a sister who has already passed away. I was born in Gálvez, Santa Fe. I wanted to be a priest but my father didn’t want to. He kicked me and then I went to live with my grandfather. I was nine years old. My grandfather’s name was Ángel Piccolo, like me. He was the one who taught me all the art. He had a mosaic factory and then we made the moldings, the tiles, everything. I am vain because I consider myself good at what I do.
News: Can you restore anything?
Piccolo: Yes. I made fifty churches. And in the General Audit of the Nation I fixed all the floors that were all broken and could not be fixed. They were made of Slavonian oak and there was no more. But I fixed it as best I could, with what I had. I was very creative, the issue is that I no longer see well. And I have to calm down.
He talks about his works as if they were girlfriends. Or women of wood and stucco that she still walks around with the air of an owner. At the Naval Circle, for example, she enters greeting the security people by their first names. He points to a mural, gets on the century-old elevator (a creaking wooden tube that is like a time capsule) and gets off at some floor to explain what he has already restored, what is missing, how he could restore the shine to each corner. On the way, he greets an ancient man who appears from a small room.
“There is no restoration that I cannot do”, says. He then puts on his hat and goes out to Florida like someone looking out into a stone garden.
The phone rings: a son. It rings again, after a while: the lawyer. It rings again after a while: a supplier. For the rest of the world today is a holiday, a national holiday, but for Mr. Piccolo something like that doesn’t exist. Every day he gets up before six and every day he goes out to visit a construction site. The Stock Exchange, he remembers, he painted it at Christmas to be able to deliver it on January 2. He earned him a strong fight with his wife but the work was finished on time and in the right way. He returned to his house only for the toast. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard for her to imagine withdrawing from him. It will be because of that or also because he started working on this when he was very young. He recounts: “My grandfather taught me all the techniques to make balustrades, mouldings… But also one day he told me: ‘I’m going to teach you two things: to be a restorer and a businessman at the same time. Because you need the money to go to the seminary and you don’t have it. Now you are 9, but in these three years, working with me, you are going to raise the money to go’. He told me so and so it was. It was five years but I only collected for three so I did two years in one (laughs). That grandfather later told me to go to the Gálvez cemetery, that he choose the most ruined grave, the worst, then clean and restore it. Don’t charge anything. Later, she told the caretaker that, if he wanted, he could do the same job for all the others. And that’s how I started. ‘To be a good businessman you also have to be a good salesman’, told me. So when I came to Buenos Aires I became a book seller for Sopena. I managed to sell in a single day what all the others sold together in a month”, she says.
News: Changing the subject, today in Buenos Aires heritage is being demolished by troche and moche. Can those houses and buildings really not be recovered?
Piccolo: No, no, everything is fixed. In Europe, in France, there are buildings that are five hundred years old and they are perfect. Everything can be restored. But here at fifty years they are already old.
News: The issue is that there are laws that protect them. There are, in fact, 2,600 properties protected by a specific law. One of them is Harrod’s. How did you come to be in charge of restoring the only Harrod’s branch in the world?
Piccolo: Let’s see: they were going to do a work of US$ 250 million. You can read it here (he opens his folder and points to a clipping). Besides, they were going to build a 5-star hotel upstairs. There are a total of seven floors but from the fourth up they were going to make a hotel. As soon as the plans were approved, we put up the posters. So what happened? The pandemic came and the owner began to run the expenses, the taxes. So I cut the light, because half a light pole was coming. Then there were mice and I took them all out. At that time we were going to do the work yes or yes but now the owner does not want to do it for money reasons. Goldman Sachs came along, putting up the money, and then none of it prospered. Then the possibility of giving a concession to the people of the gay world arose. If you go now, you will see. There are a lot of colors in the blinds.
News: Yes. The whole corner is lined with rainbow flags. But then, Harrods as a store is never going to come back?
Piccolo: No, no, that was brought up. I spent budget and everything, I made a lot of walls. I restored all the floors. Now it is the owner’s daughter, who is an architect, who is in charge of the work but she still doesn’t really know what they are going to do because the gay world is asking her for this and that. They are negotiating, let’s say. Making the hotel is very expensive. But from the first to the fourth floor they are going to make installations for presentations and all that stuff.
News: What, then, would be the new Harrods?
Piccolo: Like a cultural center. Now all that has to be impeccable, because the exterior metal curtains, for example, had marble and bronze. Some of those things were stolen and some weren’t, but that needs to be restored.
News: What did it feel like when you first entered Harrods after it closed in 1998?
Piccolo: I entered in 2017, because at that time I was restoring the Naval Circle. The owner of Harrods knew me. At that moment, the wife of the former president (N of R: Juliana Awada) passed through Florida, she saw everything closed and asked why. And she said that if everything was closed, it would have to be expropriated. That’s when all this started to move and they called me. Because everyone knows me.
