Paris1972-Versailles2003

This is yours truly with another episode of some news from Spain!!!. I have come back to the series with new work on in my dear Spain. Let me tell you my latest news chosen by yours truly, By the way CLVII is old Roman numeral for 157, Hope you enjoy this post as I.

The last report on the world tourism of the British market research company Euromonitor International left a repeated holder in recent weeks. Madrid was the third city in the world most attractive to tourism in 2023 , The Top 10 of the most attractive destinations was this: Paris, France; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Madrid Spain; Tokyo Japan; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Berlin Germany; Rome Italy; New York, USA; Barcelona, Spain, and London, the United Kingdom. I could had told you this ranking ,,,,,Webpage : https://www.euromonitor.com/press/press-releases/dec-2023/euromonitor-internationals-report-reveals-worlds-top-100-city-destinations-for-2023

The kings of pop art invade the Guggenheim of Bilbao, In 1964, Life magazine even referred to Roy Lichtenstein as “the worst artist in the United States”, although at the end of that same decade he would be crowned as the revolutionary of modern art, one of the parents of pop art. With colorful Lyrics Rosas, the Guggenheim of Bilbao today opens its exhibition signs and objects, sponsored by the BBK, a selection of some of the best pop pieces of its collection that can be seen until September 15, 2024. It was the poet and critic British Lawrence Alloway who coined the term of Pop Art in 1958, shortly after he moved to the United States and organized that one is now a sample with iconic works by 17 artists, ranging from the American pop classics to creators of France, Colombia or Germany, some contemporaries, who create a continuum and expand the legacy and validity of pop art , born in full Manhattan, Lichtenstein rebelled against the dominant art of the moment, the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and company, which the United States had adopted as a national emblem. Until the Pop generation arrived. Lichtenstein eliminated any trace of abstraction, developed and raised the comic to a pictorial category in an art that moved away from the elitist to enter the hall of the middle classes. In Girl With Tear (1977), legitimizes the pop art within the history of art with a composition that drinks from surrealism and with direct references to Magritte and Dalí, unless adding an archetypal image of the classic Superman comics , the girl crying. Although signs and objects put on the kings of pop, it also celebrates the creators less known and often ignored as Chryssa, a Greek artist who arrived in New York with just 20 years and that it was a real pioneer of the light sculpture the exhibition continues With the great seven -meter collage Flamingo Capsule (1970) by James Rosenquist, an artist who began painting advertising fences and ended up turning them into work; Robert Rauschenberg’s cardboard birds; an exquisite Jim Dine pink oil that recreates pearls with ping-pong balls; The feminist sculpture of the French Niki of Saint Phalle … as wink to the museum’s own story, the great sculpture Soft Shuttlecok (1995) by Claes Oldenburg, a giant bádminton ball that was already exposed in the inauguration returns in the inauguration of the Guggenheim in 1997. The creators of objects also turned art into fun, pop for all. Webpage : https://www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/en/exhibitions/signs-and-objects-pop-art-from-the-guggenheim-collection

The Pagés company has released the 2024 fertilizer posters at a press conference held in the poster hall of the Plaza de Toros de la Real Maestranza. The April 2024 Fair, sends Morante de la Puebla again with its presence in Five afternoons of fertilizer. It will be held from March 31 to September 29 and is composed of 24 celebrations, distributed in 16 bullfights, a run of rejones, a mixed celebration and 6 bullfighters with itchors. Webpage : https://plazadetorosdelamaestranza.com/presentados-los-carteles-del-abono-2024-en-la-plaza-de-toros-de-sevilla/

Let me tell you about some wonderful spot highlighted in the movies chosen for the Goya Awards in Spain ! The new film led by Juan Antonio Bayona, La sociedad de la nieve or the snow society. The film tells the history of the flight 571 plane accident of the Uruguayan Air Force that the members of a rugby team and other passengers experienced on October 13, 1972 in the Andes. After 72 days living in the middle of the extreme conditions of the mountain, 16 people left there alive. The Sierra Nevada National Park was the stage chosen to recreate the snow society. It is one of the favorite destinations of ski lovers and winter getaways, since in winter the Granada mountain is stained white, leaving impressive postcard images, The film 20.000 especies de abejas or 20,000 species of bees, it has been shot entirely in the Basque Country. Production tells the history of Cocó, eight years old, who does not fit the expectations of others. All who knows insist on calling him Aitor, name by which he is not recognized. His mother, in the midst of a moment of personal and professional crisis, decides to go on vacation to his mother’s house and his aunt, where they work with the breeding of bees and honey production. The film was shot in the flirtatious municipality of Llodio (Álava), in which you can visit the Church San Pedro de Lamuza or the Zubiko Etxea house. Another of the locations is Ereñozu, in Hernani (Guipúzcoa), where the Convent of San Agustín and the Chillida Leku Museum are located. Finally, is Un Amor or A love shot in Nalda (La Rioja) This romantic drama tells the story of Nat, that, after fleeing her stressful life in the city, will live in the small town of the escape. In a messy country house the young woman will try to redirect her life. After dealing with the distrust of the inhabitants of the town, the protagonist is forced to accept a disturbing sexual proposition that her neighbor Andreas makes.

The Picasso Museum in Barcelona delves into the artist’s relationship with the city and with the Catalan artists in the Paris of the early twenties. Also a new museography that, as of October, will especially affect Picasso’s relationship with the Catalan capital, will prioritize the contextualization of the works and reform the ‘Las Meninas’ room to place it together with ‘Els Colomins’, another of the jewels of the collection a series of masterpieces of the Prado Museum that will allow visualizing the dialogue between the cubist genius and the great masters of the Spanish Golden Age. Conversely, pieces from Barcelona will travel to Madrid to join an exhibition on the social painting of the 19C, Webpage : https://museupicassobcn.cat/en/node/6010

The Puente del Hacho bridge, a little known work from Gustave Eiffel‘s school located between the towns of Alamedilla and Guadahortuna (Granada province) the viaduct of the old Linares-Almería railroad line on the Guadahortuna River, the longest iron bridge in Spain , It is a great stranger for many travelers was built between 1886 and 1895. It entered into use on March 22, 1898, the bridge is made up of three sections supported by eleven pilasters, seven iron and four stone -the resolution continues. The first section, about 32 meters long, is an armed beam that starts from the bridge stirrup and has as its second support a stonecutter pillar. The next section is constituted by a beam continues supported by the seven iron pilasters. The third is an independent continuous beam supported by three stone batteries and the other stirrup of the bridge, Granada tourism webpage : https://www.turgranada.es/en/ruta/puente-del-hacho-heart-of-iron-2/

Something wonderful to read and I am doing it ! Will post on some news from Spain but could be better France anyway ,here it is, Slave, foreign and sexually exploited: the end of the mystery of Leonardo da Vinci Carlo Vecce, one of the greatest experts in the Renaissance artist, has found a notarial act that puts an end to a mystery that lasted 600 years. He tells him in the book ‘Caterina’ “That is all that was known about her, which was called Caterina,” says Carlo Vecce, a philologist, one of the greatest world specialists in the Renaissance, professor of Italian literature at the University of Naples , She was a woman from the Caucasus, kidnapped, sold as a slave several times and sexually exploited in Florence. That is the surprising portrait of Leonardo da Vinci’s mother who emerges from the latest scientific research. It has always been known that Leonardo Da Vinci was an illegitimate son of a notary of Florence called Piero Da Vinci. But for 600 years nothing has been known, absolutely nothing, about the mother of the Renaissance genius. Everything changed when, six years ago, Vecce discovered by chance in the state archive of Florence a document written by Piero Da Vinci, Leonardo’s father, in his status as a notary. The document was the act of liberation of a slave named Caterina, daughter of one Jacob and originally from Circasia, a region of the northeast of the Caucasus. It is known that the woman Leonardo portrayed in her famous picture of Mona Lisa is Elisabetta Gherardini. But the artist never detached from that painting, he never gave it to whom he had commissioned it and always took him with him in all his trips and movings, Why? According to Carlo Vecce, because that painting reflected the soul of Caterina, his mother. “There are two details in that painting that probably reminded him of her: the landscape with mountains, some mountains like the ones she had to speak, and the smile.” In Milan, behind the Basilica of San Ambrosio, they have been found recently during the works of the new headquarters of a university human remains of an ancient grave. Vecce advances that they may be those of Caterina. Find it on Amazon, Fnac etc Out March 15 2023 With Giunti Editions, ISBN No 978- 8809964235.

Take a look and do visit this region of my Spain ! The Romans called it Portus Magnus Artaborum, the great port of the art. A term that is still used to call the set of rias of A Coruña, (my home base in Galicia), Betanzos, Ares and Ferrol, end of the Costa da Morte (death coast) and the beginning of the Rias Altas. Betanzos is the perfect beginning of this route that is vertebrate by the AP-9, but that to discover in conditions you have to travel through narrow carriage and glued to the coast and not by the fast access of a highway. Betanzos is one of the historical cities of Galicia, provincial capital from the time of the Catholic Monarchs until 1834. In the Plaza Irmàns García Naveira , a large open space and surrounded by traditional houses with the typical wooden galleries painted white. In another corner, the Church of Santo Domingo rises, with a tower to the purest Galician baroque and, annexed to it, the former convent of Santo Domingo, today the headquarters of the Das Mariñas Museum, which collects the history of the region and an interesting collection of typical Galician suits. In front of the church and without leaving the environment we can see the Liceo or Lyceum, a large neoclassical building built in the 17C to host the archive of the Kingdom of Galicia (when there were seven provinces, and Betanzos capital of one of them); The documentary fund ended in A Coruña and the building now hosts the Aula Municipal de Cultura or Municipal Classroom of Culture. In its ground floor is the Tourist Office , A music kiosk and a statue of Diana Hunter, a copy of the one in the Louvre and melted in Paris in 1866. The Plaza de la Constitucion or Constitution Square appears the Church of Santiago, ordered to build in the 14C and the clock tower, which although it is attached and seems part of the temple is not; It is municipal and is accessed from the door that gives to the street. By the way, seven kilometers before Betanzos coming from Sada,(my business home each time in Galicia!!) and also on the banks of the estuary, the Pazo de Mariñán appears, from the 15C, a benchmark of the Galician gardens and the Camelias route, the Galician national flower. The gardens are open daily and are a most recommended visit (the interior of the Pazo opens only certain days). Ferrol, end of the route grew with an orthogonal planimetry always depending on military and naval needs as the headquarters of the Cantabrian fleet. But it has enough charms, from the Magdalena neighborhood to the Naval Museum that deserve a visit, It is, also, Gen Franco birthplace,,Galicia region tourist office on the route : https://www.turismo.gal/que-visitar/destacados/as-rias/rias-altas-golfo-artabro

I am told about two great pizzas places that will look forward to try this coming summer in Madrid ! Baldoria, where Ciro Cristiano has put his pizzas in the highest part of almost all ‘rankings’. Neapolitan style, it is cooked at 420 ° in a traditional Acunto oven. Essential that of Burrata di Tartufo and that of Palabaza and Ricotta. Located at Calle Ortega y Gasset, 100. And Ornella, just inaugurated local in the Caleido area. They use 100% Italian product. We suggest the Culatello, with SNA Marzano, Mozzarella, arugula and culatello (Italian cured ham) and the four cheeses. Located at Paseo de la Castellana, 259b

Some historical masterpiece for special occasions we have enjoyed in past years, It is the fourth generation of one of the best restaurants, which takes its last name. Elisabeth Horcher has been in charge, since 2007, for the management of an establishment with Solera (class), Horcher, Calle Alfonso XII who have visited personalities such as Salvador Dalí or Sofía Loren., where the jacket is forced or else, The Christmas dinner is a family recipe: a goose brought from France elaborated in the oven and apple filling delicious !!! It is clear that there will not be a second restaurant as per her, there is only one Horcher , The restaurant started with a restaurant in Berlin in 1904 by the hand of the great -grandfather Gustav Horcher. He was collected in a book The 114 years of the family business. Webpage : https://restaurantehorcher.com/en/

One tradition my parents used to make and I am dying to try again, The Orejas de Carnaval or carnival ears emerge as a delicious gastronomic tradition that has endured throughout generations, carrying with them the joy and festive spirit characteristic of carnival celebrations in the region. Orejas de Carnaval, also known as “Orellas” in Galego, have their roots in carnival celebrations that mark the transition between winter and spring. They are rigged to the celebration of La Candelaria, which coincides with the Celtic festival of Imbolc or the Irish Brigit, derived from the Santa Brígida party. Traditionally, it is the reflection of Halloween. This being the equidistant date between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, the Candelaria, Imbolc or the Brigit is the intermediate moment between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, when the days begin to be longer. Four main annual festivities related to light and fire, ultimately, with the sun. The dough is made with simple but fundamental ingredients: wheat flour, eggs, sugar and a touch of anise, which brings a subtle aroma and characteristic flavor. After kneading and resting the dough, it extends finely and cuts into elongated or circular shapes, imitating the appearance of ears. These are fried in sunflower oil until a golden and crispy tone is obtained, then sprinkle generously with sugar. Sublime !!!

Another traditional recipe my grandparents and parents used to make is the Fabada Asturiana, An Asturian fabada made over low heat, one of the most representative dishes of Asturian cuisine. We take the fabas (butter beans) soak the day before. In a pot, we cook in water the fabas with the onion and the bacon; past 90 minutes. We put the chorizo and the morcilla or black pudding. We continue to cook until the fabas are tender. To thicken the stew, we can crush the onion and some fabes, and throw them back to the pot. The fabada should not be removed with a spoon, the fabas are broken. The thing is to wiggled the casserole from time to time. In the last half hour of cooking, add the sausage to the fabada. And the black pudding. The fabada is presented with the separate company. The bacon is cut. Cut the sausage and black pudding. Thus the meats are presented apart so that each one is served to their liking. First go the fabas, and then the compango (all the sausages together). It is very newly made, but it is one of those few dishes that improve from one day to another I use Castilian fabas as we say at home however in Asturias they are fabes and equivalent in English is butter beans.fyi

There you go folks, another dandy tour of my dear Spain.  It is time to enjoy my some news from Spain once again, Again, hope you enjoy the post as I.

And remember ,happy travels, good health, and many cheers to all !!!