City in motion

Barcelona

Day and night, the movement is supple and sensuous

Author: By Alison Arnett, Globe Staff

Date: SUNDAY, March 8, 1998

Page: M1

Section: Travel

How can they manage, I wonder as I walk behind them, to kiss so enthusiastically and walk so smoothly at the same time? A week later, when it's time to say goodbye to Barcelona, the strolling kiss -- one of many espied across the city -- is perfectly understandable. Barcelona is a study in motion -- not the frenetic rush of New York City but an undulating, sensuous movement that pulsates day and late, late into the night.

This city on the Mediterranean has a history that stretches back before the Romans conquered it in 133 BC. Through the centuries, Barcelona has considered its position as the capital of Catalonia to be crucial, overshadowing even its place in Spain. In the past, its independent streak led to several unsuccessful rebellions against the central force of Madrid and Castilian Spain. Now Catalonians fiercely embrace the Catalan language, taught in schools and used cojointly with Spanish, much in the way of French Quebec.

There's a Mediterranean feel to the city, despite its size and commercial importance. When the sun is shining, which it resolutely was in mid-February, and the shop shutters come down with a bang at exactly 2 p.m. along the retail streets of the city, people pour out, linking arms, chatting volubly, heading off for a sitdown lunch at home, a stop at a cafe, or perhaps a midday amble.

Then Barcelona seems a sultry, siesta-driven place. Doing business may be necessary, but the important life is outside. There's time enough to go back to counter or desk at 3:30 or 4 or maybe even 5. The routine is repeated in the evening as older couples holding hands walk La Rambla, or Les Rambles in Catalan; young children ride atop their fathers' shoulders, young women walk arm in arm. From the statue of Monument a Colon, a towering statue of Columbus pointing over the harbor, the wide center pedestrian mall (vehicles are banished to narrow side paths) is crowded with walkers, with street mimes and musicians, with a multi-stalled flower market, a section of birds and small animals for sale, the tiled and glass-roofed entrance to the amazing Boqueria food market.

It became my quest to chart the ways to gyrate in Barcelona, from the miles my daughter and I walked each day, to the jump-up motion in the discos, to the curving lines of the city's famous architectural wonders that seem to find it hard, too, to stand still despite the limitations of stone and mortar.

Beyond the Plaza de Catalunya, a big circular space where one can see an Ecuadorian band swaying with pipes and guitars, a demonstration of Catalan dancers in full costume, or just women and children feeding flocks of pigeons, is the Eixample area. Here the pedestrian walkway stops but the broad avenues continue through elegant 19th-century buildings with expensive shops and cafes on street level and offices and apartments above. It's bustling but more businesslike, one thinks, than La Rambla, a normal big-city feel to it. That is until one reaches what's called Manzana de la Discordia, or the Block of Discord. Suddenly the handsome and regularly proportioned buildings give way to two with wildly extravagant flourishes.

The third, Gaudi's Casa Batlo, positively shimmies, its facade mottled in shades of gray, blue, and pink, its curving roofline a scaly representation of St. George's dragon, a Catalan symbol. It's rare that a building makes me laugh, but this one, which has a perfectly normal collection of office buildings and labs within, does. The building seems to move, in that way of Barcelona, but that's nothing compared with Gaudi's Casa Mila, or La Pedrera (the Quarry) a few blocks up Passaig de Gracia. This apartment house undulates right around the corner, looking a bit like a lumbering cartoon elephant. Inside the building, the center patio displays highly decorated exteriors and playful curves and loops on each floor. If a building could dance, La Pedrera would be doing the tango.

Antonio Gaudi is the best known of the Modernisme architects whose playful embellishing and contouring of late-19th century buildings liberally season Barcelona's landscape. One can only imagine the reaction when the 31-year-old architect took over the mammoth Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia project in 1891 and began to reshape a Renaissance facade, complete with a gigantic roseate window, into a fantasmical ballet of squiggly towers and crenelated windows. Wars and arguments have made this church a more-than-century-long project, and it's still rising, with bulldozers and other construction equipment roaring inside the frame. Gaudi created the eastern facade before he was killed by a streetcar in 1926, but, to my untutored eye, the western facade, dominated by mammoth, angular scupltures by Josep Maria Subirach, doesn't match, having little of the fluid liveliness of the original.

The city's walkers don't resemble much the American model of resolute speed walkers with their specially-designed sneakers and baseball caps. Here, the women dress stylishly and wear comfortable leather or suede shoes to walk; the teenagers favor low-heeled boots. I rarely saw a sweatshirt unless on a tourist, and the men, especially those of a certain age, wore sports jackets with a lovely patina of age.

Other forms of dogged exercise weren't apparent, either, with only a few runners spotted weaving through weekend throngs. Although the guidebook said Catalans were getting into fitness, we had a big gym pretty much to ourselves one afternoon in the Eixample area. The attached cafe, however, was bustling with diners and smokers.

On a Sunday afternoon when the museums all closed by 2, we visited the Parc de la Ciutadella, a lovely green space lined with ornate buildings and a zoo. The favored form of locomotion was a pedaled cart with a canvas roof; couples and whole families wheeled slowly or recklessly around the paths. It took a while, but we finally found the rental shop and soon twirled away a sunny hour ourselves before heading off to the harbor for a late afternoon lunch of paella in an outdoor cafe.

Picasso's early work charts the Barcelonian urge to subvert straight lines into curves, to make art and architecture dance. In the Museu Picasso, one can see his leap from traditional portraits in his teenage years to new ways, less straight-line, of viewing the world. The museum in two medieval palaces leads into the Barri Gothic, the old heart of the city, where we wandered happily. There the streets twist and turn, well-populated with walkers, the byways lined with shops and bakeries, cafes, small coffee bars and ``xocolata'' stops (this is a Catalan form of hot chocolate so thick as to make a spoon necessary.) Now and then, one emerges into a square where a lone guitarist or flutist might be playing or sometimes a whole jazz ensemble, with bright notes bouncing off the stone walls.

Although it's certainly possible to get lost in the Barri Gothic, and we did several times, somehow all paths seem to eventually to lead to the Cathedral de la Seu. Built from 1298 to 1450, the Gothic cathedral has a dark, lacy, and very imposing front and a soaring interior, the shadows lit by banks of votive candles. One evening, I stumbled into a concert there, the vast interior filled with residents as well as tourists, the beautiful sounds of the church's organ and an accompanying trumpet filling the space. The solemn feeling in the darkened cathedral was leavened by a little boy who kept scampering away from his grandmother to try to blow out the flickering candles.

The cathedral is also the site of one of the loveliest forms of movement in Barcelona, the Catalan dance of the sardana. Every Sunday morning at 11, people gather to join hands and step out a rhythmic ritual, accompanied by ``cobla,'' a musical ensemble of stringed and wind instruments. I watched, intrigued at a circle of older people, who had piled coats and satchels in the middle of the circle. They danced sedately, toes pointing in a one-two, crossover three, four. Wearing athletic shoes or regular street shoes, they smiled at each other as they went around slowly several times and then speeded up for several circles with the music, which flowed rather squeakily across the plaza.

Soon more circles formed, many of them serious-looking younger people who came zooming up on motorbikes, removed street shoes, and donned flat, cream-colored espadrilles that tied up the ankle. As the circle nearest me danced, rising high up on their toes, a leader paced the edges, calling out instructions to speed or slow or to change places. Next to them, other adults taught a small circle of children how to do the steps, reminding the little girls to hold their backs straight as they followed the bouncing music.

Later I asked ballet teacher Isabel Poncar, who was instructing a class of very serious young women in the Royal Ballet Academy syllabus, if her students studied folk dancing. At first she listed traditional folk dances, but when I asked about the sardana, she smiled. ``Oh, everyone does that -- with their families. That's for fun,'' she said, shrugging, bemused that one would even ask. The sardana, used by Picasso as a symbol of peace in his paintings, is as natural to the Catalans of Barcelona as walking. And walking . . . well, walking is life.

Located high up on Montijuic, the hill south of the city, the museum display is one of two in the ornate palace, an immense exhibition hall built in 1929. The pride of the Romanesque exhibit, which was reopened in 1995 after years of restoration, are frescoes that were peeled from the walls and ceilings of churches all over Northern Catalonia starting in 1919 and transferred to Barcelona. The frescoes, which were in Pyrennes churches in danger of decay and collapse, are the cornerstone of the museum's effort to preserve the Romanesque heritage of the Catalan culture.

Notwithstanding history, the impact of the exhibit is visceral. One walks into the first hall and gasps at the frescoes covering a curve of an arch, glowing, jewel-like paintings from the first half of the 12th century that once adorned the walls of the Pyrennes church of Sant Pere de la Seu d'Urgell. Many of the frescoes represent saints being martyred or of Christ's crucifixion; the lines are square and bold, the colors strong. Many of the frescoes had been damaged before being brought to the museum and the missing patches reinforce their beauty, their reality. Interspered among the frescoes are wood-carved altar frontal pieces, small sculptures, silver chalices, and other religious objects.

But a great part of the beauty of the collection is in the way the frescoes and other objects are presented. By the time one has wandered from one room to another, gazing up at soulful eyes that a 10th- or 12th-century artist depicted for Mary or Christ, a trick of time and space occurs. It's as though one is really in a tiny mountain town, kneeling in the church of Santa Maria de Ginestarre or the Benedictine abbey of Sant Serni de Tavernoles, awed by the beauty and the solemnity of man's attempt to represent the divine.