What I like about Madrid is that in every corner we find a piece of Spanish History.
I remember that weekend when we spent a few days in a guesthouse on Atocha Street near Antón Martín and that from time to time I went down to have a drink at the brewery that is next to the Monumental theater.
A couple of guys dressed in tails entered the crowd, one of them over six feet tall. They came to the bar, put in a couple of rods for their bodies and came out again. It was clear that they were performing in the theater and that they belonged to the “TVE Orchestra and Choirs” as it says on the facade of the Monumental theater.
Walking through Madrid as a tourist means paying attention to the triangular plaques that specify places with history. I still remember with amazement that time, waiting at Puerta del Sol on the corner with the beginning of Alcalá Street, I read one of those signs and it turned out that right there the writer Valle-Inclán had lost his arm in a fight with a journalist after an argument.
On the façade of the Monumental theater there are two information plaques, on one it says that the musician Prokofiev once performed there and on the other, which is the one that interests me the most, I could read that the Esquilache Mutiny began at the doors of the theater or against Esquilache, an Italian politician in the service of Charles III, on Palm Sunday, March 23, 1766.
Some experts on the subject say that this Popular Mutiny was the prelude to the French Revolution. In those years, the king of Spain was Charles III and the political system was known as Enlightened Despotism, that of “everything for the people, but without the people.”
The Spanish 18th century is of great importance and interest, although because it is so forgotten, it seems that the events that occurred did not occur. Piketty says that in those years between 25 and 30% of Spanish properties belonged to the Catholic Church and after that Mutiny due to hunger and precariousness, little by little society changed.
I also read, to give more luster to the site, that in that same Monumental theater which is the concert hall of the Spanish RTV Orchestra, on Atocha Street next to Antón Martín, where to perform you have to wear a tailcoat; The Communist Party of Spain founded the so-called Popular Front on June 2, 1935, at the end of the Second Republic.
In short, a site at first glance like any other, it houses the beginning of the Esquilache Mutiny in 1866, the founding of the Popular Front in 1935, also in 1935 a Prokofiev concert and the look of a curious person who was leaving a bar after have a drink and watch football on TV back at the beginning of 2024, all without leaving a couple of facades on Atocha Street in Madrid.
It’s what makes a city so strange, fascinating and monumental.
Fin
2024-04-21 18:43:14
#Monumental #Theater #Diario #Mérida
