Mexico City  - Whoever follows in the footsteps of Francisco "Pancho" Villa (1878-1923) and Emiliano Zapata (1879-1919) is in for a surprise: discovering the other face of Villa's black legend and understanding how the two revolutionaries of 1910 can still live on so long after their deaths.

The tourist will find wartime love stories and victorious troops who beg rather than loot, and see Villa, "The Centaur of the North," forcefully recruit 350 children not to make them fight, but to make them go to school.

Among its cultural tours, Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) offers one which not only follows the activities of the two revolutionaries, but also looks at their personalities and ideologies.

On December 6, 1914, Villa led his cavalry unit Los Dorados into the Mexican capital. Three years earlier, he had spent a week's honeymoon with Luz Corral in downtown Mexico City's Iturbide Hotel which currently houses the Banamex Museum and Palace.

The famous "sarakof" hat Villa wore during most of his campaigns contribute to the myth surrounding the womanizing, sexist and violent macho. Inside the hat shown in the History Museum at Chapultepec Castle, sewn and protected with a plastic cover, there is a photograph of Luz, "the love of his life," as the revolutionary once confessed.

Of the 12 women certified by the registry as Villa's wives, she was the only one whom he actually married in a religious ceremony, even though he did not believe in God and although the parish priest at San Andres, Chihuahua, had to demand that he disarm before the May 28, 1911 ceremony.

A month before Villa's triumphant return to the capital, his main ally, Emiliano Zapata, had done the same, followed by thousands of well-armed peasants and indigenous people.

For Zapata, this was one of few encounters with a world of a French-style cobbled streets which appeared to intimidate him.

The two men had no opposition. Their common enemy, Venustiano Carranza, had fled, and they were hailed by the people.

They posed for photographers at the National Palace: Villa smiled while Zapata stared at the camera suspiciously.

From the building's main balcony, the revolutionaries watched one of the longest military parades in history, featuring some 50,000 men and lasting over eight hours.

Afterwards, the two leaders looked for simple accommodation. Neither of them contemplated using official facilities. And they soon left, separately, to pursue other fights.

Villa made use of his brief stay in the capital to rename Plateros street with the name of a man he greatly admired, Francisco I Madero, who launched the Mexican Revolution.

A shot that left a mark on the roof of the restaurant La Opera, at the corner of 5 de Mayo and Filomeno Mata, is often said to have been made by Villa. However, Armando Ruiz Aguilar, a researcher at the INAH, rules out such an episode.

Some Zapatistas, with their .30-30 rifles across their shoulders, had coffee and paid the bill at an old branch of the Sanborns cafe chain, where the Madero bookshop currently stands, at the corner of Madero and Gante. Others wandered through the streets, knocking on doors to ask for food.

"None of their bosses was made to take on the responsibility of the presidency or wanted to be in power forever. Zapata took up arms with the slogan 'Tierra y Libertad' (land and liberty), in the name of peasants who lived in abject poverty in what is now the state of Morelos," Ruiz Aguilar says.

"Villa's biography, personality and vision were different, more complex. He had gone a longer way, carrying out more activities, holding ties with foreign companies like Wells Fargo and the German armament maker Krupp," the researcher noted.

With Wells Fargo, he negotiated a generous payment in exchange for not raiding its facilities and "protecting" it.

Such unconventional methods, along with many other controversial episodes like the 1916 raid on Columbus, New Mexico, practically kept Villa out of official Mexican historiography until 1964.

For the same reason, he was also kept off the mural, A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, by Mexican artist Diego Rivera, which shows important figures of that era.

In 1964, following intense debate, the legislator Everardo Gamiz finally managed to have Francisco Villa's name included in golden letters in the honours wall of the Legislative Palace of San Lazaro, the seat of the Mexican Congress where it still shines. (dpa)