Palermo | Nancy Kulfas | Middle East | Buenos Aires

"The neighborhood feels completely different from the rest of the city," Nancy Kulfas tells me. She's a Buenos Aires native who runs Atípica, a Palermo Viejo shop that specializes in local arts and crafts, -everything from paperweights to paintings. Kulfas also writes a trilingual blog, Trendy Palermo Viejo (trendypalermoviejo.blogspot.com), with entries about the neighborhood in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. "Palermo Viejo has a very particular charm … cobbled streets, two-floor houses, and a certain tranquility," she says. "There is a permanent cheerful spirit. Nobody seems to be in a hurry here. It's impossible not to enjoy it."

AT THE RISK of squaring the double negative: I'm not sure that it's impossible not to enjoy Palermo Viejo. But it's certainly not easy to dislike if you enjoy good food and drink and unique shopping - and especially if you have U.S. dollars or euros to exchange.

None of those were things that drew the first of the area's settlers. People have lived in Palermo since the 1600s - long before the neighborhood had a name, much less all those subnames. The population surged in the 1800s as Spanish and Italian immigrants were joined by thousands from Eastern Europe and the Middle East who came either to work in the neighborhood's emerging businesses or to start their own.

Most of those who made their homes in Palermo, with the exception of the ones in the wealthy Palermo Chico barrio, were middle class. Palermo Viejo was a particularly humble enclave. Too humble, perhaps. By the 1980s, when Argentina's continually troubling inflation rate was out of control, Palermo Viejo's businesses began closing. And many continued to sit vacant even through the economic recovery that followed a decade later, preceding the major 2002 crash. Only now is the whole of -Palermo Viejo coming back to life.