The theater began as one man's ambition. In 1889 Emilio O. Schiffner bought a company that planned a lyric theater and set out to build Teatro La Ópera. He hired the German engineer George Goldammer, an acoustician who reworked the original design - the decision that would later draw Caruso's praise. Then the money nearly ran out. The Panic of 1890, a financial crash that rippled out of London and hit Argentina hard, stalled everything, and the old company's debts pressed in. Construction did not truly begin until 1903. What rose out of that long delay was not a compromise but a jewel.

Rosario at the turn of the century was a city of immigrants, and many of them were Italian. It shows in the theater's bones. A team of Italian artists led by Luggi Levoni decorated the interiors and exteriors, and Giuseppe Carmignani painted the great stage curtain with scenes from Greek mythology, echoing the curtain of the Teatro Regio di Parma in Italy. The result feels less like a provincial playhouse than a slice of Europe transplanted to the Paraná, which is exactly what its makers intended. On June 4, 1904, the house opened with Verdi's Otello - a fittingly operatic christening for a hall that would spend the next century welcoming singers, ballet companies, and orchestras from around the world. Five tiers of seating rise toward a painted ceiling, holding an audience of 1,450, and the proportions are intimate enough that the human voice carries without strain - the very quality that would stop Caruso in his tracks.

The theater owes its present name to a reading group. A cultural association called El Círculo de la Biblioteca - the Library Circle - had been meeting at the Biblioteca Argentina and needed a home of their own. In 1943 they bought the building, preserved it, and renamed it Teatro El Círculo. Theirs was an act of stewardship as much as ownership; rather than let a grand opera house drift into disrepair, a society of readers took it on. Today it functions mostly as a cultural center, still hosting performances beneath Carmignani's gods and goddesses.

For the theater's hundredth anniversary in 2004, Rosario restored it completely, and made it the stage for the Third International Congress of the Spanish Language - a gathering of writers and scholars from across the Spanish-speaking world, held beneath the same ceiling Caruso had sung under. The city also did something quietly theatrical to the streets outside. At the corner of Laprida and Mendoza, the sidewalks and roadways were remade to look as they might have in 1904 - asphalt torn up and replaced with cobblestones, old-fashioned lampposts installed - turning the approach into a small plaza out of another era. You arrive, in other words, by stepping backward in time before you ever reach the door. For a building that almost did not survive a financial panic, that nearly went unbuilt, it is a remarkable second act: more than a century on, El Círculo is still Rosario's grandest room.