Word: catalan
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...took over, and it became a capital in the 9th century A.D., when Charlemagne's heirs conquered the city port, threw out the Arabs who had taken charge of it as the northern extension of the Arab conquest of Spain, and then in effect turned it over to a Catalan strongman, Wilfred the Hairy, the semilegendary founder of the Catalan state...
...Catalan Gothic is austere, primal, bony architecture, nowhere near as decorated as French or English. Its grandeur is all in the structure, and no building displays this more piercingly than the 14th century church of Santa Maria del Mar, the "workers' church" of Barcelona, with its sublimely plain interior, a solemn Sequoia grove of stone hewed from the quarries of Montjuic, the mountain that guards the port...
...disenchantment, as if it were akin to a disease. "Spain is ailing," says Jose Maria Aznar, head of the conservative Partido Popular. "A climate of anxiety has taken hold." Even the popular Barcelona Games, which have spurred an architectural renaissance in that aging port, have been besieged by Catalan nationalists insisting that their flag be flown and their anthem played. Last week police arrested seven armed members of the Catalan independence movement for plotting to kidnap an Olympic athlete or official. A newspaper headline groused, THE OLYMPICS WILL COST EACH TAXPAYER MORE THAN 32,000 PESETAS...
...savory city of rebels and craftsmen would appeal to Hughes, the longtime art critic for TIME and the epic chronicler of his native Australia (in the best-selling Fatal Shore). In Barcelona Hughes shows, in magisterial detail, how the brash province has always been as distinct from Spain as Catalan is from Spanish (derived as it is not from early Latin but from later). At the same time he notes, with affectionate irony, how Catalans have sometimes sung the praises of their unique tongue in Spanish. Some Catalans, he remarks, feel homesick even while at home...
Barcelona, then, is not so much a travel book as a prodigiously researched biography of the city, taking in every nook and cranny of its involved history, from the 9th century confrontation of "Wilfred the Hairy" and "Charles the Bald" to the Postmodernist affectations of today's Catalan renaissance (the Olympic Village for this summer's Games, Hughes notes, was named after a Utopian socialist scheme of the last century that fizzled disastrously). In the Middle Ages, Catalan was probably more spoken around the Mediterranean than French, Italian or Spanish, and the Catalan empire had consulates in 126 places; later...