Dottore Gianni's Sojourn to Spain: The Last Three Days in Madrid

Day 11

This morning (Friday 4 October) was the first day that it rained in my entire time here – and tomorrow and Sunday, my last two days in Spain, look to be gorgeous, so I can hardly complain. I’m pretty sure I mentioned before that “I’m not half the man I used to be.” The trip, excellent as it is, has taken a toll on my slightly diminishing energy. So after breakfast I decided to stay in bed, wait out the rain, and get some work done on notes for and photos of the trip. So glad I did, as I felt that not only had I accomplished some things, but also that I was much more ready to get out and about after a "time-out." 

So at about 11:30 am I headed vaguely in the direction of the Reina Sofia art museum, my main goal for the day, but on the way went in search of two elusive little streets that parallel each other, but that, for this old fellow less and less sure of direction, have thus far proved not all that easy to find. They are the Calle de Cervantes and the Calle de Lope de Vega. And after several wrong turns and much backtracking, I found them, very near and parallel to the charming Calle de Huertas, which I discovered on the first part of my stay here.

As a good lapsed Catholic I love making confessions. Here is one, not so much regarding this trip to Spain, but about what I have always considered a singular failure in my theatre history course. I know a good bit about European theatre, but

The Calle de Principe at Plaza Santa Ana is the
site of the first major public playhouse in Spain

 no matter how much I learn from books, I always discover a good bit more while visiting the country concerned. And I must say that I have visited almost all the European countries that have featured significantly in the history of theatre. Except for Spain! From the late 1500s through much of the seventeenth century, Spain enjoyed a “Siglo de Oro” – a Golden Age – in its theatre. Its public theatres were very like Elizabethan theatres in that they were outdoor spaces that featured bare platform stages. The plays were somewhat like the plays of Shakespeare as they were very active, ranged freely in time and space, and were very bloody or very comic, and some contained elements of serious as well as humorous drama. There were major playwrights as well, including Lope de Vega, Calderon de la Barca, Tirso Molina…and another fellow named Cervantes. Cervantes is of course fabled for his

Quirky little pizzeria taking advantage of Cervantes

 brilliant early “novel” Don Quixote, and if you know none of the other writers, chances are very strong that you’ve at least heard of the author or the title character – the man of La Mancha, the knight of the woeful countenance.

Brilliant as Don Quixote is, the plays of Cervantes are not as strong as plays by Lope, Calderon or Tirso. This much I know from my study of theatre history via books and lectures by very good professors.

Cervantes and his
creations, Don Quixote
and Sanch Panza
Plaza de España

What I did not know until this trip is that Cervantes and Lope de Vega were bitter literary rivals and while one did not entirely snub the other, they did not much like one another personally. The younger Lope began to have great success on the stage, and Cervantes, who had written several short pieces called entremises, as well as some full-length plays such as The Siege of Numancia (not a promising title), faded before his rival.

As the Rough Guide notes, both writers are probably spinning in their graves as the House/Museum of Lope de Vega is on a street now named for Cervantes, while Cervantes is buried in the Convento de las Trinitarias, on the street now named for Lope de Vega!

I was lucky enough late this morning to latch onto a tour of the Casa Lope de Vega, where Spain’s most famous 

Casa/Museo Lope de Vega

playwright lived for 25 years. The woman conducting it was very good but her accent was strong and I don’t think that everyone (myself included) caught everything she was saying. I was relieved to hear that most of what she said I already knew – and when she asked if anyone knew the plays of Lope, I was able to quickly answer (as do half the characters in the play when questioned at the trial) “Fuenteovejuna!”

The casa a beautifully preserved place, and one of the few in the city to display a typical if rather grand seventeenth century house. The house may be grand, but Lope was never rich – perhaps it had something to do with providing for his many children in and out of wedlock, one at least born AFTER he had become a priest (tsk, tsk). I had a brief chat with the guide after the tour and she informed me of a similar house, on Calle Mayor, where Cervantes was born.

After my lucky tour I took myself to the second great museum in Madrid, The Reina Sofia. And a wonderful place 

Reina Sofia

it is! I did not tour all of it, as I have become a tad museum-worn this trip, but I did do the second floor, which houses much important art, more by Spanish painters than others, perhaps naturally enough, from 1900 to the 1940s. There’s a good bit of Picasso (painted after what you can see in Barcelona), a very nice Dali room, in which the film made by that major surrealist and his compadre Luis Buñuel runs: 

Sculpture in the central courtyard
of Reina Sofia

L’Age d’Or. I watched a good 20 minutes of that before proceeding to the paintings! The current curator of the museum is apparently a film buff, and has placed appropriate films in several rooms – what a great idea! Miro is also nicely represented on this level, as is Francis Picabia, a major Spanish Dadaist. But the prime reason to go to this museum is to see the iconic Guernica by Picasso. And it is stunning! Larger than I expected, and even after all the reproductions I’ve seen, more powerful than I imagined, it is a devastating statement against the Fascists in the Spanish Civil War, but a great general anti-war painted diatribe as well. I won’t go further into it because my words are not up to the task. One of the best aspects of the room it is in and others surrounding it, is that they are packed with images, some similar to Picasso’s (and possibly borrowed by him) b other painters, some painted before, some around the same time as, and of course some after his own exemplary work.

Guernica - until you've seen it in person, you've not really seen it.

There is apparently a good collection of painting after 1945 up on the fourth floor, but I gave it a miss as I was getting tired and a tad peckish.

This is the rather incredible side wall of the Caixa Forum, another
arts/cultural center in Madrid, very near the Reina Sofia - no
particular reason to show it, except of course that it's stunning!

So I had what I can call a very good Friday of touring. It was a relatively light day, and I ate somewhat lightly as well. I had had a very good salad – the tomatoes here are large and luscious – at the Café Europa (next to my old hotel) the previous week, so I went back and had an equally fine salad that evening. On my way home I stopped at a small 24-hour market for the third time and got myself a large bottled water, some potato chips and two beers, and was nicely rewarded by the man at the register who recognized me as a “regular” customer and gave me a discount! In a country which features perfunctory service at best to English-only tourists, it was a very friendly gesture and a nice way to end my day, before I tippled myself into a slight stupor in the silence of my lonely hotel room.

In spite of the outside noise – my one window, a floor to ceiling affair, looks out on a very popular pedestrian street and the party goes on all night – I slept long and deeply,

My room and "window" at Hotel Francisco I

partly from being tipsy, partly from exhaustion, and partly thanks to the very well sealed window. A note on that window. I am on the first floor and in order to keep the window open and watch the world outside, I’m afraid that I too am watched, so for the most part the shade is nearly always down. I must admit I feel a bit like an Amsterdam prostitute, peeking out to see what’s shaking outside, but for the most part keeping shuttered. Of course I have no thought that I might lure an occasional customer into my room…what a thought! Who in her/his right mind would pay for my favors!?!

Day 12

Mercado de San Miguel

On my penultimate day in Madrid I started out with a trip to the market. But not just any market...the Mercado de San Miguel is special! The turn of the century building has been refurbished recently and the space, created from a lot of iron, 

a little wood and a lot of glass, it's a stunner in itself, but the food inside is fresh, tasty and beautifully displayed. I went early, because the place becomes tourist central and consequently mobbed beginning around lunchtime through the end of the day. Even if you're not hungry when you walk in you will be drooling if you don't taste something while you're inside. 

Okay, not all the food at the Mercado de San Miguel is attractive, but you've got to
love that bif fish on the left!

After the culinary pleasures of the market I took myself across town, just beyond the Prado, to the pastoral pleasures 

One entrance to Buen Retiro Park

of Buen Retiro Park. I have been interested in this park for years as I lecture about it regularly in theatre history. Calderon de la Barca, after lope de Vega the greatest playwright of the Golden Age of drama in Spain, wrote a variety of plays, but wrote more for the court than most other writers of that important time in the seventeenth century. One of his plays, Loosely translated as The Greatest Enchantment is Love, is about Odysseus and Circe (you may

The lake at Buen Retiro

or may not remember she wanted him to stay on the island, and turned his men into pigs) and was presented for the king and his court at a re-creation of Circe's island in the lake that is a central feature of this "buen retiro" (nice place for the king to retire to) across central Madrid from the royal palace. The Italian designer Cosme Lotti built a floating stage on a lake, lit it with 3,000 lanterns, and featured incredible effects including a shipwreck, a chariot drawn through the water by dolphins, and the destruction of Circe’s palace. The king and his court watched this spectacle from gondolas floating in the lake.

Boats on the lake at Buen Retiro

So I've wanted to see Buen Retiro for some time, and was not disappointed. The park is a huge stretch of green in Madrid,

 and as the day I was there was beautiful and unusually warm for early October, it was packed with people, other tourists certainly, but many residents as well. I located the lake easily enough, and while there were not gondolas to be had several people had rented boats and were enjoying an afternoon on the water. I found a little place near the lake to have a bocadilla and a large beer before strolling out of the park and back into the busy center of Madrid.

Fall colors in some of the trees at Buen Retiro

The day ended on a less than happy note, with a weird supper at an Italian place just next to the hotel -- chose to sit outside (where I've had just about all my food here) but the staff were not being overly attentive -- only three tables set up, at one me, at another a rather grizzled but friendly couple - he spoke good English and we chatted briefly -- and I think British tourists, an old man, possibly his daughter and possibly hers at the third. We were fairly harassed by beggars, not-very-good street musicians and people trying to sell us things -- mostly just nuisances, but more than I've ever 

encountered in such a short period of time -- I now realize that waiters standing outside are not just looking for customers here, but that part of their job is to chase of a sadly huge amount of people begging. A rather wild woman came up to the Spanish couple and he just told her to get lost, she came to me and I used my standard No hablo espagnol and she muttered something to the effect that I could speak it and tapped me on my back before she headed off to the British trio, with whom she got got rather animated - the old man spoke Spanish and she laid into him with some angry words (meanwhile, no restaurant staff outside) -- and sped off -- then a few minutes later a young man, really mean-looking, came up to the British threesome and before anybody knew it he slammed his fist onto the table right next to the woman spilling water all over the place and her -- she was clearly panicked -- the friendly Spanish fellow shouted at him and he ran off, but all of us were a bit shaken. Finally a waiter came out and the Spanish guy told him what had happened - the waiter brought out another bottle of water to the table and told them it was free (I should hope so!).

Anyway, I've seen a few near-miss ugly incidents while I've been here - but this was one of the worst and even though I had a really nice rest of my day here it is one of the things that has made this trip a sort of love-hate adventure, instead of one that I'd hoped would be all love!

Day 13 and last

First thing I did today is something I wanted to do since I came to Spain, and even more so since I visited the Prado. I

made it to Goya’s tomb! And paid a brief homage to a man who has become one of my favorite painters, as comfortable at court as he was in painting, before anyone else did, paintings so dark and unreal that they can only be called “modern.”  The homage at the tomb, which lies at the center of a small chapel, the Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida, is only part of the reason to visit. The other is that Goya himself decorated this chapel with beautiful frescos on the ceiling, which you can see rather easily without craning your neck because of four very well placed mirrors. So I was able to see another sampling of Goya’s fine art work.

I then caught the Metro  to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, which, while some guide books put it in a distant third place from the Prado and the Reina Sofia, was still 

worth it to me. A distant third from the first two is not to damn it, as the first two are clearly world class museums. Rick Steves, for example, writes that the Thyssen-Bornemisza houses second-class works by first-class painters, and while this may be true in most cases, to see a “second-class” painting by Picasso, such as his Harlequin with Mirror” or a beautiful portrait by John Singer Sargent of Millicent, 

Picasso's Harlequin with Mirror

Duchess of Sutherland, gives me great pleasure. This museum houses two collections, that of Baron Thyssen, a very wealthy and fairly tasteful collector, and that of his wife, Carmen, a former Miss Spain. While there are some pleasures to be had looking through her collection - each floor is divided into some of his work, and some of hers - if you're at all pressed for time I'd stick to the Baron's collections, rahter than Carmen's. One of the things I enjoyed most about this museum is that it contains solid work from Medieval Italian painters straight through to the cartoons of Roy Lichstenstein and the haunting visions of the British painter Francis Bacon. So it’s a fine trip through much history of western art.

Sargent's Millicent, Duchess of Rutherford

I spent a few very happy hours at the museum, and then, at around 1:30 pm went out in search of lunch. I landed at Plaza Santa Ana, and, as has become a tad too usual on this trip, 

Plaza Santa Ana and the Teatro Español

made a mediocre choice in terms of food. I tried to order some tapas (finally – I fear the tapas bars where Spaniards aggressively point at what they want, exchange a few words that I understand not, and get apparently exactly what they want), but my server kept pointing out things on the menu that they no longer had, so I ended up with yet another 

Mediterranean style salad (lettuce, tomatoes, onion, egg, green olives, a spear or two of white asparagus, and tuna – in this case a welcome addition for me was a cucumber slice or three). This was not a bad choice, given many others I could have made, but I have made this choice at least four times now. Still, it could have been far worse, and the day was fine as I sat outside and watched the Madrileños pass by in one of the prettiest squares in town, and the one in which the first plays for the public were performed as far back as the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. 

A pretty fountain in central Madrid.

I then strolled back to the area near my hotel, made a last stop at the beautiful Plaza Mayor, made a search for a few souvenirs, and headed to the hotel for a much needed siesta, and slept longer than I thought I would, but also got a good bit more done on my writing and photo preparation.

My last evening in Madrid was a slight disappointment, as the bocadilla I searched for was the worst I’ve eaten  -- by far – on my trip here. There is Iberian jamon and then…there is Iberian jamon. Ah well…in spite of that and of several other setback and disappointments on these two weeks in Spain, it was all in all quite an enjoyable and educational trip. And what more can one ask than that?