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 Barcelona: The Great Enchantress
by Robert Hughes Robert Hughes has been going to Barcelona regularly since the 1960s and was married in its Gothic city hall last year. Although in his new book Hughes is compelling and engaging in describing Barcelona's remarkable culture and history, his first subject is his 40-year love affair with the city. Thus it is a much more personal book than his earlier Barcelona. Since publication of that book in 1992, Barcelona has become one of the most vibrant and popular cities in Europe; Hughes describes the pre- and post-Olympics reconstruction that sparked the tremendous revival. This is a lively and engrossing account of the history, the art, and especially the architecture of "La gran encisera," the name Catalonia's great 19th-century poet, Maragall, gave to his native city-"the great enchantress." He tells how at the end of the 14th century-when Madrid was hardly more than a cluster of huts-Barcelona commanded a trading empire as wide as the Mediterranean. Barcelona was always what a recent mayor called "the north of the south," the part of Spain closest in contact with Europe, technologically advanced, proactive in trade, passionately democratic. Its wealth made it one of the great Gothic cities, filled with architectural treasures of the 13th-15th centuries. Its language, Catalan, was the medium of an enormously vital literature. Crushed and colonized by the Bourbons in Madrid in the 19th century, Barcelona nevertheless entered a period of prodigious industrial and architectural growth (rebuilt by, among others, the genius Gaudi). Repressed by Franco, who hated the Catalans, it has blossomed anew since 1975 and especially in the last decade. At the end of the book Hughes and his wife return to Barcelona for a one-person exhibit of her watercolors. "Once again I was off to my favorite city in Europe, or the world. For the twentieth time? The thirtieth? Long ago, I lost count. You are lucky if not too late in life, you discover a second city other than your place of birth which becomes a true home town. Some forty years ago I had that marvelous stroke of luck: Barcelona."  Paperback 176 pages - 5" x 8" - (9/07)
ZC7949 Barcelona: The Great Enchantress $10.95
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