The Segovia Stargate

At Segovia, those of the tour people who would be provided with lunch broke off to the designated restaurant, while the rest of us were given a generous hour and a quarter to find lunch ourselves as we please and then meet in the shade by the aqueduct. My brother's and my tour package not including the lunch option, we had the foresight to pack sandwiches.

The aqueduct:

The aqueduct seems to be Segovia's most famous  landmark. A stunningly well-preserved artifact of Roman times, it was built mortarless (except for at the top where there is new construction with mortar) and t rises gracefully over the eighteenth-nineteenth-century buildings of that area of Segovia. Looking at it through the alleys, a series of arches framing empty space, obviously alien...

"It's a stargate!" I burst out.

My brother later admitted that the alienness of the thing made him feel annoyed at the Romans for plonking it down in the middle of the city where it doesn't belong. I grinned and told him of the Viennese palace,  that I had brought up in conversation a couple of weeks before, that has Roman excavations going on in its courtyard, and how my first thought was, "Dumb Romans, to go and build stuff right in the courtyard of a Viennese palace."

( More on the aqueduct, the Cathedral of Segovia, and how I learned to stop worrying and respect castle moats )

My legs were aching on the descent down to the bus, and there ends my summary, without pictures that, even with my meager photography skills, can tell a thousand words, of our visits to Avila and Segovia.

The Weaponry of Guns, Pictures, and Language

My feet have apparently sinned against me sometime in the distant past, because every vacation I go on, I proceed to beat the daylights out of them.

Today we went to the Royal Palace and to the Prado, mainly because they are things that everyone will be asking us about anyway. Well, I was keen on the Prado; I don't think my brother is as keen on art.
( The Royal Palace: A Tale of Two Empires, and the Bilingual People Inside Them )

The Prado is next post.

How to Recognize Renaissance, and Other, Art

My feet were beginning to complain by the time we went to the Prado, which is a pretty good walk from the Royal Palace.
( Read more... )

Paintings that I wrote down that I liked:

Nicholas Poussin's Saint Cecilia
Miichel Coxcie, Saint Cecilia also (I like music, in case you haven't noticed)
Mor, Pejeron the Buffoon (somehow the court paintings of the buffoons made them very sad people)
Quentin Massys, Christ Shown To The People
Joaquin Sorolla, And They Still Say Fish Is Expensive  (it shows two fishermen trying to revive a dying young fisherman)
Antonio Gisbert, The Execution of Torrijos
Raimundo de Madrazo, Aline Masson (there were two portraits of her I liked; Wikimedia only has the one with a white mantilla)
Emilio Sala, Expulsion of the Jews (this was the first time a painting conveyed to me how the Catholic kings actually felt when they did it, and how did Torquemada feel; it does not excuse the act, but...)

and some others I can't find on Wikimedia right now.

Please let me know of any mistaken links.

But yes, I can say I've seen Titian and Tintoretto and Rembrandt and Caravaggio.

And Goya's Black Paintings.

Goya ended up going the same way Turner did; I first met Goya when one of the things I brought back from my first trip to Spain was a stationery set featuring his paintings, on sale. By the end of the Museo del Prado, I can recognize a Goya dead on at twenty paces --- and I skipped ten rooms of Goya.