The economic crisis that hit Spain in recent months is palpable, but it would not undermine the desire to socialize outside of Madrid, home to exchange words and ideas. Four days in Madrid enough to imagine a possible different way of life, where the desire to communicate and dialogue seem more widespread than is the case with us.
Illusion of those who smell a bit of urban life, filtered by the tourist guides?
Maybe. Easy steps to
surface having little time (but what's wrong with the superficiality nell'approfitare offered today by low cost flights , allowing me to visit a European capital with a few Euros?).
is then up to the individual traveler relativize, recalling that one thing is the daily routine of their own country, often able to knock the enthusiasm and the poetry of life, another thing is to taste the snapshot of a capital city full of life and places, where people love gather to talk late into the night.
Of course Madrid is a city that comes alive after seven in the evening and goes to sleep and shuts itself as seems to want to do the Milan today.
Madrid - apart from a number of places to see that I could not resist to list at the end of this post - I discovered two highlights did not know and that alone are worth, in my opinion, the journey.
artists are, incidentally, opposed to each other.
Light and darkness, life and death, success and social and deep loneliness.
Joaquin Sorolla and Francisco de Goya.
Joaquin Sorolla or light .
very famous painter in Spain, we are not very popular, figurative art is fully expressed at the highest levels. Lived at the turn of the century could easily be considered a conservative painter, above all if you think about what was happening in the arts in those years in which new cultural movements and-isms of all kinds were going to revolutionize the contemporary artistic sensibility. Sorolla Yet, while traveling to European cities and often coming into contact with avant-garde artists of the time, always continued to paint his beaches, his children, his wife from the air sweet and reassuring. While not failing to grasp at times social aspects (the rural workers and English villages, orphans of the colonies to the sea), aided by the consent of the English bourgeoisie, Sorolla achieved fame in Spain by joining an exceptional talent and a painting technique to a simple desire: to represent the beauty around him.
There is something incredibly high in its ability to capture the light blinding sea of \u200b\u200bEnglish, the sharp shadows of the south, the folds of the clothes of bright women of the century. The same light that hits the Gardino that houses the museum dedicated to him and that was his home. An enchanted garden, including statues, fountains, jets, box hedges and flowers, which, though now choked between some buildings in a neighborhood Madrid is a small place miraculous.
Francisco de Goya 's abyss.
Do you think about the video by Chris Cunningham with music by Aphex Twin?
for me represent the most ancestral fears and terrors. Nothing like it too, but a little 'how to dip a spoon into the troubled waters of our nightmares and bring out the worst: freaks, grinning young, post-nuclear landscape, angelic female figures generated as an offshoot of the "devil" himself.
got to do with Madrid?
Of course I was not expecting what I saw in the room to the south of the Prado Museum.
In this room are the paintings of the so-called pinturas negras of Francisco de Goya. The man who had painted the winking Maja Desnuda or who had denounced with the courage and the effectiveness of his painting the violence of the totalitarian state who also served, he painted these pictures at the end of his life at the house known as the Quinta del Sordo when, deaf himself, alone and abandoned by all, he thought that there would have lived his last days.
are paintings depicting the terror of the proximity of madness and death, but also united to piety to the condition of living beings in an attempt to describe the fate seemingly senseless.
Only Francis Bacon and the Expressionists approaching both in the Twentieth Century figurative.
Not much to say about these paintings. Watching them takes a
dizziness, discomfort, dismay: men grin from his face distorted by a post-acid-like visions (just like in the video of Cunningham / Aphex Twin), divinity dire that their children Sbano , men who will fight each other to death, for no apparent reason , dog drowning in the mud lost as a dot on a canvas, evil goats who sit at boarding school between human trembling.
A compendium of human fears, which so often will be used by others throughout the twentieth century, until today, "secular" forms of expression in film, literature, the video game.
For me, I needed to recover Sorolla light of the deep emotion of Goya.
But what else is there to do in Madrid?
- Walking through the nose in the air to center the map and discovering the various Barrios (at any time of day or night).
- Visiting tapas (every day between 19 and 22, but even before that. There is always a good time to eat in Madrid).
- The Museo del Prado (a full day if required). Huge black painting by Goya and the sacred art of José de Ribera .
- The Museum of Contemporary Art Reina Sofia (one day), from the cultural center CaixaForum (a small Beaubourg) and the Atocha train station (a botanical garden surrounded by transit passengers).
- New modenissimo district north of Madrid (2 hours to reach by metro, my photo at the beginning of post) with its breathtaking skyscrapers
- The San Miguel market, covered market where not for sale but you can taste any kind of delight, from cod fish served with tripe, from churros to the best wine of Spain. All standing among your friends.
