Don´t cry for me, poor Evita

One of the first things that anyone is tempted to do in Buenos Aires — besides learning how to tango, of course — is visit the crypt of Maria Eva Duarte de Peron . You may know her better as Evita, the title character of the Andrew Lloyd Webber /Tim Rice musical “Evita.” Since I don´t dance, even in my worst fantasies, I settled for a walk through one of the fanciest cemeteries outside of New Orleans .

It´s free. And it´s big. Walled in with brick a dozen feet high, the Cementario de Recoleta has any number of famous Argentine residents. But none is known more around the world than Evita.

At virtually any time of the day, you´ll find people lining the narrow walkway through 10-feet-high crypts of every color of stone between blue-gray to ebony, trying to get close to the crypt with the words Familia Duarte emblazoned across the top.

This isn´t the first stop for Evita´s corpse. It was stolen , so the story goes, by the military in 1955 when a coup overthrew Evita´s surviving husband, Juan Peron . Buried in Milan, Italy, under a fake name, Evita´s corpse wasn´t returned to Argentina until 1974, when it was placed under enough steel and concrete to ward off any further attempts at grave-robbing.

Today it sits, regally, amid hundreds of other similar monuments to the dead, famous and unknown, infamous and unremembered. Standing before it, you´re tempted to start humming Webber´s annoyingly catchy tune — which, damnit!, I´m starting now to do.

I blame Madonna .