Last year I visited Madrid for Thanksgiving. I wanted to discover the city because my second novel is set in it and I also needed frequent flier miles to keep my airline status. So off I went. I was blessed with dry weather and crisp temperatures more in line with early October in Europe than late November, and that made for a trip to remember. Madrid is a beautiful city. I didn't expect how beautiful it was - far more beautiful than Paris, and far cleaner too. I took many inspiring long walks in the Centro and tried to imagine what the city looked like back in 1939, for my novel.
I landed on Thursday morning and had set up car service to go to the hotel, the Doubletree by the Prado, which is undeniably the hotel to stay in if you want to be near the cultural attractions of the city. The hotel was well furnished and the custom if for the hotel staff to give guests a warm cookie/brownie at check-in. I am not too much of a brownie person but I have to say that warm brownie was excellent. Then I left my luggage in storage since my room wasn't ready and went straight to the Prado museum, a short walk away. Yes this is the sort of things I do after a transatlantic red-eye flight. Let's go see some paintings! I should have learned more Spanish before I left (I ended up learning a lot of Spanish after I came back thanks to the two volumes of introductory Spanish available on The Great Courses but since everyone in the hospitality industry knows English it was not very important to know Spanish, although it helped to read menus).
The Prado was as magnificent as advertised, but since I prefer modern and contemporary art I was eager to visit the nearby museums that were more aligned with my taste after checking in at my hotel. My heroine and her husband live close to the Puerta del Sol (although of course I might change that) and given the historical significance of the square I obviously wanted to see it myself. It was quite a mental exercise to remove all the modern additions to the square but in 1939 it must have seemed just as busy, in a different way.
I was very impressed by the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, with its amazing collection of modern paintings by giants such as Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Gauguin, Robert Delaunay and Georges Braque and artists I had never heard about such as Frantisek Kupka and Albert Bierstadt.
I went to see the inevitable flamenco show and walked through the Barrio de Las Lettras near my hotel. A friend who had lived in Spain many years ago had told me about la siesta - that time between approximately 4pm and 7pm where everything closes - and I thought that surely this was a thing of the past, but no, the siesta was still in full force, although it is possible to find a few restaurants open continuously from lunch to dinner. I found one where I enjoyed a delicious gazpacho and some Spanish specialties.
Now, my favorite museum of the whole trip was the Reine Sofia. As luck would have it, it not only displayed pictures relevant to my novel (lots about the Spanish Civil War, and I'm not just talking about the remarkable Guernica) but the special exhibition Lost, Loose and Loved: Foreign Artists in Paris 1944-1968 had just opened.
Coming out of the Reine Sofia I took a peek at the train station, which plays a key role in my novel (assuming I don't change the ending) and wandered through the Royal Botanic Gardens. I also tried a couple of bakeries, which were ok but nothing special. I wanted to see the Palacio Real but by that point it was the weekend and the lines to get in were enormous, so I just walked through Madrid some more.
At the end of the trip I managed to go to the church of Santa Barbara, which also plays an important role at the end of the novel (again, assuming I don't change the ending). It was closed but I got to walk along the side where my heroine is supposed to make her escape. Even with the street view of Google Maps, there is something to be said for on-the-ground research so that you get the key details right. The church looked very imposing. I could easily imagine Franco walk through its doors back in 1939. The sense of history was very strong.
To improve my Spanish I bought myself several Spanish-language books, the best way I know to make me practice a language: the Spanish-language guide of the Prado, the Spanish translation of C.J. Sansom's A winter in Madrid, which I love (except for the ending), Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One hundred years of solitude in Spanish (I have the English translation already), Los pacientes del doctor Garcia by Almudena Grandes and a book about the creation of the Guernica painting. This is in addition to the two small catalogs of the Reine Sofia that I bought in English, another book in English about Guernica, a sketchpad with a Guernica cover, a CD about music played at Federico Garcia Lorca's memorial service and a completely unrelated CD about Antonio Pappano directing the Santa Cecilia Orchestra in the three symphonies of Leonard Bernstein, whose biography by Humphrey Burton I adore. I swear I managed to make everything fit in my carry-on for the return trip to the United States but it was a close call.
I am very glad I took this trip.
