La gran encisera

For what it's worth, I recently finished Robert Hughes' follow-up to his 1993 masterful cultural history of the city. Barcelona, "The Great Enchantress," as the nineteenth-century Catalan poet Joan Maragall called his native city, was published in 2004 and is more of a casual weekend read than Hughe's dense and erudite Barcelona.

Here are a few passages that jumped out at me, for better or for worse:

Barcelona's pride in its provinciality

"Some provincials—and there is one in most Australian hearts, including mine—struggle to throw off the stigma of their provincialism by relating chiefly, or in some cases only, to the huge cultural centers: New York, Paris, London. And in fact I have lived and worked longer in New York than in Australia. But I have never lost my tropism for the big small town that feels like home. Hence my feelings about Barcelona."

Barcelona's (4 1/4) artists

"The 1,500 years of the city's existence had produced only five names that came readily to mind. There was Gaudí, of course, and the century's greatest cellist, Pau Casals. There were painters Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso, who though he was actually born in Málaga and spent nearly all his long working life in France had become a sort of honorary Catalan, having attended art school there and used the city as his point of departure for Paris." (Had he not heard of the accomplished soprano, Montserrat Caballé?)

The Falangist legacy and Barcelona gris

"One main reason why Barcelona seemed so hard to penetrate—apart from the unfamiliarity of its language, Catalan—was that it had decayed so badly since the loss of the civil war. Spain's dictator, Franco, hated the place and wanted revenge on it for opposing him. He had been in the saddle so long that most Catalans did not remember a world without him. After him, Spain had to be reinvented, a daunting if exhilarating prospect. The father of one of my best friends there had put away, years before, a magnum of fine champagne. When Franco died he was going to open it, but not before. Franco's death was heralded by a fusillade of popping corks all over Barcelona, but not my friend's; it had been sitting in the fridge so long that it had gone flat. So, in a sense, had the city itself. Barcelona gris, gray Barcelona, was how people referred to it, looking back on the years of Franco and his much despised Falangist mayor, Josep Maria de Porcioles i Colomer, who ran the most intellectually inert and historically oblivious city government of the twentieth century. Barcelona had turned into a sort of sleeping princess, neglected, and ignored. It was one enormous ashtray, covered in a mantle of grime and grit."

George Orwell on Gaudí's Sagrada Família (Homage to Catalonia)

'One of the most hideous buildings in the world ... I think the anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance.'

On Montjuïc

"...when the Romans conquered a place, they took it over completely and re-formed it in their image. So it was with the little settlement that straggled up the slope of Monjuïc—a name, incidentally, that may (but not certainly) derive from Mons Iovis, the "hill of Jupiter."