Word: avila
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Spanish town of Avila (pop. 24,400) was in an uproar last week. "Sacrilegious!" muttered the patrons of the coffee houses on the Plaza de Santa Teresa. "Blundering lie!" thundered the head of the tourist committee. Mayor Jose Maria Martis wrote furious letters to the Bishop of Salamanca, the Cardinal Primate of Spain, the Superior General of the Discalced Carmelites in Rome and the Spanish government. He, and almost everyone else in Avila, wanted a book suppressed and its author reprimanded- if not shot at dawn...
...book in question was Volume One of a scholarly biography of the great 16th Century mystic, St. Teresa of Avila. Its author was the learned father superior of Saragossa's monastery of the Discalced Carmelites, which had been St. Teresa's own order...
Though action, and particularly rebellious action, went much against his grain, his friend St. Teresa of Avila enlisted him in her crusading reform of the Carmelite order. Anti-reform monks kidnaped and imprisoned him in a cell in Toledo's Carmelite priory for eight months, where he was taken out once a day to eat crusts and water on the refectory floor, and kneel while the monks tried to change his mind by walking in a circle around him, lashing his bare back with leather whips...
...most audacious opponent of Franco inside Spain, Luisa María Narváez y Macías, fifth Duchess of Valencia, was restless in the quiet of her ancestral palace at Avila. But she had promised, after her third sojourn in Franco's jails, to withdraw from active politics for a while. So she rode horseback, drove her sleek Cadillac with the ducal crest on it, ran a charity kitchen in a wing of her palace, and wrote her memoirs. There was plenty to write about, including her expulsion, at the age of ten, from a convent...
This week, with his successful Madrid show behind him, Palencia is still in search of beauty. From his summer headquarters in an old mill on a hilltop near Avila, he starts out each morning accompanied by an old shepherd who guides him along mountain trails until he finds some scene that catches his eye. By autumn, he hopes to have 30 or 40 new sun-and space-filled canvases for next year's show in Madrid. "I am still far from reaching total maturity," says white-haired Palencia. "But I am on the right path...