Word: catalunya
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...grandmother sewing in a foggy all-blue room; this veiled figure is the first of the Sibylline crones who would keep turning up in his later work. He does Fauve blotches -- Mediterranean with measles, after Matisse and Derain -- and combines them with elements of the classicizing movement which, in Catalunya, was known as noucentisme (20th century-ism), with "timeless" peasant figures, olive trees and old arches...
...newcomers could be seen trying to figure out a city where pijamas are desserts and streets have periods in the middle of their names (Paral.Lel). Journalists were struggling to work out why three different coins were worth a peseta (less than a cent) and whether the regal Placa de Catalunya really was enhanced by an enormous inflatable M & M. More than a half-century ago, Barcelona, the city of seasoned oppositionists, had been all set to hold the "People's Games," to counter the Hitler Olympics of Berlin. But civil war interceded. Now, as fireworks lighted up the sky above...
Central to this sense of cultural and political uniqueness is the Catalan language. As Hughes observes, "In Catalunya, language and politics are entwined , interwoven, inseparable." During the dictatorship of Franco, in fact, one way of stamping out any leftover feelings of rebellion was to ban the public use of Catalan. When writers could not be published in Catalan, they used it as a gesture of political defiance...
...from these humble origins that the city first arose. While the rest of Spain speaks Castilian, Barcelona and Catalunya claim Catalan as their own; its existence as a language apart bolsters the region's own sense of political and cultural identity. The cultivation of the land by the region's first farmers also aided this nation-building process. Even today, as Hughes readily informs us Barcelona is "more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commerce," and "its democratic roots are old and run very deep...
...next 500 years proved an uplifting time for the Catalans. They were years of economic expansion and political self-assertion. Before Columbus ever sailed for the New World, the allied kingdoms of Catalunya and Aragon already possessed a far-ranging Mediterranean empire. And in what was to become a predictable pattern (aside from the city's prodigious capacity to re-invent itself time and time again), the citizens of the city fought for their rights during many nerve-fraught periods. Their successes are notable: the Usatges, for instance, dates from a century before the Magna Carta and is essentially...