Iter Facere

Saturday July 21 - Madrid

Today the National Archaeology Museum. Its huge, two full floors covering a small city block. It is completely absorbing. Who knew that there was a prehistoric presence on the Canary Islands. How did they get there? Or that there was a lot of Paleolithic art in the Sahara desert? That particular exhibit had a six or seven foot stele with horses and other animals inscribed on it. I guess the Sahara wasn’t a bad a place 20,000 years ago.
The museum ends up being a history of the Iberian peninsula, so you see the artifacts from all of the cultures that have lived in Spain. There’s a lot of them. I knew that prior to the Romans the Carthaginians had settled parts of spain, as did the Phonecians, but there were other cultures in the Guadalquivir valley and elsewhere. One question that popped up was why did the Carthaginians settle the southern coast of Spain, but not the northern coast of Morocco? I gotta get a book.
A great Iberian statue, the Dame of Eula (spelling?) with gigantic ear adornments was another surprise. Again, I forget that the people that the Romans conquered had their own advanced cultures and weren’t just sitting around in mud huts eating berries.
Nice Greek vase collection. Some beautiful multi-colored glass perfume bottles stood out. I didn’t know that the ancients knew how to do multi-colored glass. The section on the post-Roman world was interesting. The highlight is a set of golden crowns a Visigothic king gave to the church upon his conversion. We could even understand the Latin (or at least Sean could). On and on the museum went, with Arab art and then Mudehar works. The only drawback was that almost nothing was explained in English. Of course, that was also a plus, since if there had been English signage we’d have spent a week in there.
After lunch at a pretty little restaurant on the Paseo, we walked the long way down to the Royal Botanic Gardens. They had an exhibition of bonsai, which was a nice surprise. There were a couple of tree I’d like to get, Picea jezonensis, Pinus sylvestris, and Quercus ilex. The last we’d seen in Alquezar on our walk to Alpan cave. Its leaves are thorny at low levels, but as the tree gets taller the leaves on the upper branches lose there thorns. The leaves look just like a holly leaf (hence the name).
Finally dinner at a wonderful little Asturian restaurant, Rey Silo. The food was nice, I picked a good bottle of wine, the chef and the servers kept chatting with us, and kept giving us little samples of food. When we ordered dessert, the chef brought us out an extra one, a cuajada that was delicious, with a sight yogurt tang that we’d hadn’t encountered before. At the end, after we ordered orujo con miel the brought out a non-alcoholic liquor for Sean. A nice ending to our trip.

posted by Jim @ 7:24 AM