The Basilica di San Petronio was intended to be the largest church ever. But it did not reach it’s full length or full width and the facade is only clad from the ground up to a bit above the doors.

Basilica of San Petronio facade

Rome was upset that Bologna might build a church larger than the Vatican’s. The pope owned a piece of Bologna land right in the path of construction. He said, let’s build a campus so the university classes can be in one building instead of all over the city.

Archiginnasio

So in 1562, he built the Archiginnasio, where for 200 plus years the university thrived. Today, it is a joy to visit. Two stories tall with a central courtyard. The walls are intensely decorated with family crests of the students and ornate reliefs to honor favorite faculty members. In 1830 the municipal library replaced the university. The library has the regions most precious books. We saw some in a lovely book cage from the late 1400’s.

Fresh mushroom (250+) exhibit in Archiginnasio

San Petronio, Vatican interference or not, is still massive. (The facade is 165 feet tall. The interior is 430 feet long. The width is 215 feet.) Inside it has two pipe organs. One of them is the third oldest in the world, built in 1476 by Lorenzo di Prato.  The other organ was built by Malamini in 1596. We went to a concert for two organs. The organs are on opposing sides above the carved, old, dark, creaky, wooden choir chairs, more like thrones, where we sat.

San Petronio organ

The program was mostly Italian compositions from the mid-1500’s. All the composers’ names were unfamiliar to me. They were compositions intended to allow improvisation and embellishment by the player. The players were outstanding. We all loved it.

San Petronio has restoration going on. The backside is covered in scaffolding. When work is slow, they allow civilians to ride the rickety metal cage elevator to the top. We did that. The view was splendid. Bologna consists of narrow stone streets lined with stone buildings with large entry gates. Usually the large, horse-drawn-carriage scaled, wooden doors are closed. We know beyond the doors are gardens. So getting above the roof line was interesting. There was a nominal fee of three euros to go up. The church said it was a fundraiser to pay for restoration; three euros at a time.

Our third city, Barcelona, is one of our favorites. On this visit, instead of renting an apartment, (as we usually do), we stayed in the new, five-star, twenty-eight room, six-story, Hotel The Serras, facing the Mediterranean. In the lobby, they greeted us with smiles and glasses of cava, (Spanish sparkling wine. The French prohibit them from calling it “Champagne”, but that is what it is).  Our room, sleek and modern, had two balconies with harbor views. It also had an iPhone, which we were invited to use throughout our stay.  It was set up for international calls and free data!

The top floor has a large painting of the face of Pablo Picasso. It commemorates his presence there at age fifteen. It was his painting studio. (Picasso was not native to Barcelona, but spent his teenage years there before moving to Paris.)

It must have been a great place to paint. Great light off the sea. There is a great view now, as I imagine there was then, lots of activity to hone in on. The waterfront, the Mediterranean, has the huge commercial ships, the little local boats and luxury yachts. (The Nirvana, a yacht, was conspicuously parked in view. It is 300 feet long and rents for $900,000 per week.)

Also there are iron towers holding up cables for aerial gondolas which travel from the waterfront up to Mont Juic, the hill full of museums (the Miro), the old Olympic stadium and Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. 

The roof top space is outfitted as a very comfortable hangout spot. There is comfortable furniture for sitting upright at a table, lounging on a chaise or sprawling on a sofa for a snooze. There is shade and open air.  A stainless steel, rectangular pool is perfect for a dip, but only a dip because it is only four swim strokes long. There is a bar which offers food, drinks and towels all day. We used it a lot.

Our stay in Barcelona was only for a few days, but they were the days of the annual Mercè Festival when the city teems with activity. Mercè refers to Our Lady of Mercy, which sounds like it would be a religious holiday, but if it is religious, it is not apparent.

Two traditional activities stand out. In a tangential way, they are related to the current dilemma with the recent vote for independence from Spain.

There is something called, Castells, which is Catalan for castles. They are towers of people standing upon each others shoulders. They can rise ten people tall. The beefy men with strong shoulders stand at the bottom. The lighter weight people stand atop them, etc., etc. For the grand finale, a small child runs up all the shoulders, to the top, where their little arm is raised in a victory wave.  According to recorded history, they have been doing this for a little over three hundred years.  Seven years ago, UNESCO declared it a “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.”  Typically, in Barcelona, it is done in the Plaça Sant Jaume where the important city and state government offices are. It is currently ground zero for the independence vote. The plaza gets jammed with spectators. So jammed, you might not fall if you raised both legs.

The other popular event is a dance, the sardana, done to the live music of traditional, Catalan, reed instruments.  The sound is coarse, reedy and a bit screechy, but the melodies, like from a Spanish Puccini, are sweet, romantic and somehow make you feel something, maybe nostalgia. The dance is done in a circle. The circle begins with only a few people, usually Catalans, native born. More folks join in. The circle grows. When it gets too big, it breaks into small circles. They have been doing the sardana in Catalunya for more than five hundred years.

During the last century, Generalissimo Franco, the dictator, while he was alive, made a great effort to extinguish Catalan culture; to compel the Catalans to become  “Spanish” in their culture and language. Banned in public, things “Catalan” went underground in order to be kept alive. Franco’s death enabled a renaissance of Catalan expression.  During the recent weeks, as Barcelona has struggled with their vote for independence, the issue of maintaining their Catalan cultural identity is front and center. When they dance their dance, in their circles, to their sweet melodies, (played on screechy reeds), when they stand atop each others shoulders to make castells, they are remembering, and honoring, their centuries old culture that was once imperiled by autocratic policies.  Whether one is Catalan or not, it is easy, while hearing and watching, to sense what they are doing is deeply special to them.

Other Mercè Festival events are held in the Ciutadella Park. Enormous, like New York City’s Central Park, on most weekends it is filled with joyous activity. On Mercè weekend it is absolutely crazy. There were so many people. Some lounged in their hippie-like bacchanal, on India print bedspreads, on the grass. Children, everywhere, ran and laughed. There were food stalls and exhibition pavilions with long lines.  There were street performers invited from around the world to roam the park and make people joyful.

One attraction caught my eye. It was a curved dirt lane with about a dozen home made metal machines, contraptions really, which all together looked like a Willy Wonka gymnasium. One, a twelve foot tall metal man, sculpted from scrap metal, had lanky pipe arms. They arms had levers. Children pulled the levers with the goal of making a lanky arm poke it’s long finger into the metal nose. Small children gave it a go. It was harder than it looked. But when the finger poked the nostril we all howled.

No matter how much of the city we get to know over time, there are always surprises. One day, while wandering among very old stone buildings, we saw a little sign which directed us into a little vestibule. The vestibule, on the ground floor, lead into a room with four soaring Roman columns, fully intact, standing since the year 100. Originally, they stood as part of a temple to the goddess, Isis. After the temple fell into ruin, the columns were used to support a five story palace. The palace eventually fell into disrepair and became apartments in the 1800’s. A book shows a photo of an apartment with the columns supporting the floor, walls and roof. Finally, a portion of the building’s core was removed to reveal for us the enduring work of human beings. I am always thinking, while in Europe, the “old world”, what do we build in America that will last two-thousand years.

Wes and Marlow
Barcelona, September 24-27, 2017

Granada, our next city is like a dream. On one of it’s hills is the Alhambra, which is a combination of fortress, village and royal palaces.

Here is a bit of very general backstory. In the year 711, people from north Africa, we will call them moors, islamic moors, flooded into Spain. They took possession of the entire Iberian peninsula except for the north coast. They displaced what we will call the Spaniards, christian Spaniards. The Spaniards battled the moors until 1492. The Spaniards won. The final conquering occurred in Granada.

The early arriving moors, in the 700’s, made outstanding settlements in Cordoba and Seville. They created buildings with extraordinary interior decorations. Though they had inhabited Granada from 711, it was during the 1200’s when the sultan ordered the creation of the Alhambra.

They erected buildings which from the outside are large, plain, stone rectangles. The

interiors were, and remain, decorated with elaborate and extreme plaster work. The walls have geometric designs engraved in the plaster. The ceilings have what resemble stalactites crafted from thousands of plaster cylinders affixed to the ceiling and carved to create the effect. The outdoor spaces which connect the buildings have reflecting pools, fountains and slender troughs embedded in the pavement. The water comes from the melting snow on the Sierra Nevada. The moors crafted an intricate system of aqueducts and cisterns and valves; and they constructed their water features according to elevation so each pool and fountain could feed the lower ones. The water enables verdant gardens of trees, hedges and flowers. It makes the ambiance cool on hot days. And the water supplies a continuous sound. A Spanish composer, Francisco Tarrega, wrote Recuerdos de la Alhambra for solo guitar, to reflect the hypnotic beauty of walking through the Alhambra.  

We walked through it twice; once by day, once by night. On our night in the Alhambra,

  

the moon was shining. The ornate interior facades were mirrored in the still water of the reflecting pools. The air was cool. We shared the space with very few people. The sultan’s palace has buildings for various purposes. One for receiving solicitors. One for entertaining. And one, the most intimate and lovely, the courtyard of the lions, for his residence and being with the harem. The courtyard is lined with elegant slender columns, far more than necessary, over one hundred.  They constantly divide your vista.  In the center is a fountain supported on the backs of twelve lions. Twelve lions: one for each month, each hour of the day, each sign of the zodiac, etc. The lip of the fountain is engraved with a poem. The poem extols allah, over and over. A significant portion of Alhambra’s the engraved plaster wall decoration consists of the written word, allah.

Our hotel, the Parador San Francisco, is part of the Alhambra. When Queen Ysabel and

King Fernando won possesion of the Alhambra from the last sultan, they kept most of the buildings intact, but a few they razed or repurposed. Our hotel was that way. A few bits of the hotel had the islamic moorish decoration, but the remainder of the building was a monastery built by the Spanish in the early 1500’s.  In it’s beautiful courtyard, there is a photo of the building from 100 years ago. It was falling apart, in extreme disrepair. The intervention was made just in time to save all the buildings of the Alhambra.

There is an oil portrait of Queen Ysabel in the lobby. It is not attractive, not something

you’d expect a monarch would approve of. When she died in 1504, she was interred in the islamic part of our building. She and later her husband remained there until their grandson completed, down the hill, the Capilla Real, where their tombs are today. Referring back to the Prado and the Rogier van der Weyden painting, a copy of it hangs facing the marble royal tombs in Granada. There is a funny aside regarding these tombs. Laying beside the king and queen are their daughter and her husband. Folklore says, the daughter’s husband, Felipe “el Hermoso”, died and a priest convinced her he could revive him so she traveled with her husband’s corpse for several years, occasionally lifting the lid to have a peek, until she was declared “loca”  Juana “la Loca”.

Before visiting the Alhambra, I read Tales of the Alhambra, by Washington Irving. It was like a book of fairy tales and Arabian Nights stories. He lived in one of the palaces in the 1828, when the buildings were in extreme disrepair, when they served neither royal nor political functions. He wrote of looking down to the river, where at night there was always life going on and the sound of the guitar.

There is still the sound of the guitar in Granada. We went to a flamenco establishment,

Peña la Plateria. It functions as a private club and a flamenco school. On site there is a terrace restaurant. We ate Spanish home cooking of simple foods: beans with ham, gaspacho, eggplant with honey. Afterward, we paid our ten euros, sat indoors at our table and enjoyed a young man and his guitar. He mesmerized us for a dozen minutes when a dancer came out to accompany him.

In the twentieth Century, the leading Spanish guitarist, famous enough to be called by one name, Segovia, began his guitar instruction in Granada in 1900. There is a recording of him sharing, in English, his recollections of the streetcars, the bougainvillea, the lovely girls, the magical Alhambra in the moonlight and the sweet perfume of the orangeblossoms. We have been there and every thing he said is still true.

Wes and Marlow
Granada, September 20-24, 2017