Green parrots and ham.
Melting buildings, Cava all day. St. George and the Dragon, dinners at ten, green parrots and ham. So much ham. Barcelona is a charming and evocative city. Made up of many neighborhoods and spread between two mountains and the sea, this city is Spanish, but not. The primary x-filled language of Catalán signals a separate and distinctly unequal balance between heritage and politics. Barcelona was a hotbed of the Spanish Civil War and the tradition of unrest continues since, every day. It seems, there’s a demonstration as separatists (and unionists and feminists and many other ists) march on toward tomorrow. Good thing there’s cava.
Davis and I spent a week visiting Gaudi Modernisme buildings, drinking coffee, (and more coffee) eating lovely tomato bread, olives, anchovies, squid, and ham, and shrimp, and Spanish omelette, and paella. Drinking cava and Tinto. And ham. Bellota ham (from acorn-fed pigs). Iberian ham, Serrano ham.
We woke daily in our Sagrada Familia flat across the street from Gaudi’s monumental — (and as yet unfinished) temple to ornamented devotion and marveled at this exquisite city by the sea.
Ironically, my Spanish is way better than my Italian, but my heart, while tempted by Barceloneta and the city’s elegant avenues, remains solidly in Firenze.
I must confess, try as I might, I’m not loving Gaudi. His work certainly stands out as unique and wildly creative with its Jules Verne miasma of sea creatures and aquatic life, fanatic Catholic imagery and endless undulation. His custom furniture looks to be far more comfortable than that of his contemporary, Frank Lloyd Wright, but the visual fatigue I experienced inside his houses and outside his church settled not my soul.
Most interesting, for an architect remembered mostly for external style, Gaudi’s substance and elegant fin de siecle engineering solutions (from arch construction and brick lamination to ventilation and material upcycling) seem far more interesting than his skulls, dragon backed roofs and cephalopod towers.
