Adamo Boari trained as a civil engineer at Ferrara and Bologna, qualifying in 1886, and then worked his way across Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and the United States before arriving in Mexico around 1898. Under Porfirio Díaz he became the regime's preferred designer of public monuments, and the two buildings that face each other across Avenida Juárez are both his: the Palacio de Correos of 1902–1907, an Isabelline Gothic fantasy in chiluca stone hung on an American steel frame, and the new National Theatre, begun in 1904, whose Carrara marble exterior is the most complete work of Art Nouveau in the Americas. He left Mexico in 1916 with the theatre unfinished and the revolution under way, settled in Rome, and died there in 1928.
