Word: lorenzo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...fancy of a baron's butler and be carried away to a Florentine villa to grow up as a young man of the leisure class. But if it was luck it was bad luck. The butler pampered his adopted son and then cruelly turned against him. At 18, Lorenzo found himself on the streets with a taste for champagne and no money to buy it, with a living to be earned and no training to do it. After two years of odd jobs, he felt lucky to be hired as an office boy. Then like a fool...
...gallery, basilica and a pantheon of kings all joined in one. But most of all it was-and is-the symbol of the change-resisting spirit of Spain, as Philip II defined it when he decreed its construction. Now celebrating its fourth centenary, the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo of El Escorial is the largest and most ambitious Renaissance building in Spain and still, in esthetic effect, an impregnable bulwark...
...Romantic Poet Théophile Gautier called it the "granite debauch of Spain's Tiberius." Even its floor plan reflects a grim occasion. The monastery is named in honor of a humble 3rd century deacon who was burned alive on a gridiron by his Roman torturers. San Lorenzo, it is said, calmly instructed the Romans: "This side's done. You can turn me over now." His coolness under trial won him a lasting place in Spanish devotion...
Thirteen centuries later, Philip II defeated French forces at the battle of San Quentin. By that victory he turned the tide to bring the Spanish Empire to its highest glory. Because it took place on Lorenzo's feast day, Philip decided to put up a monument to the saint, the empire and God - built on the plan of a. gigantic gridiron...
...last in 1586, El Escorial was consecrated on the eve of San Lorenzo's feast day, with 200,000 oil lamps illuminating it so brightly that the glow could be seen in Toledo, 50-odd miles to the south. Its walls stretched 675 ft. by 530 ft., embracing 16 courtyards, 4,000 rooms, 86 staircases, 88 fountains and 100 miles of corridors. Philip had commanded his architects to create "simplicity in the construction, severity in the whole, nobility without arro gance, majesty without ostentation." Except for the gables, almost every line in the facades is dead straight; the exterior...