zaragoza sereno

Zaragoza is celebrated as a hyper-rambunctious university town, with the most bars and clubs in all of Spain - a one-stop multi-night party central...but we must have arrived in a bit of a time-warp, because all was calm, all was still, not even a crooked finger from the shadows...and now we know that we missed the nocturnal enticements because we did not stay up very very late enough!

We stayed at an uber-cool hotel across from the colossal Basilica de Nuestra Senora del Pilar [whose bells toll on the quarter-hour!] in this most immense and serene of plazas...with its pristine surfaces and stage-set immaculateness...and the low winter light gilding the ornate renaissance edifices...
A poignant moment for the funeral procession of a female officer from Zaragoza killed in the Haiti earthquake as they accompanied her casket into the basilica...

Smaller squares are tranquil and classical, traversed occasionally by lovely fur-coated women and distinguish-looking men, all quietly off to somewhere elegant and meaningful...
Beyond, the dissonance of another world in a varietal of eras... with many store window displays reminiscent of the 1960's, chocolaterias from the turn of the 20th century, chinese restaurants from the 1980's, a chain of retro1970's diners called VIPS [that now also owns the Starbucks franchise in Spain!], and the most idiosyncratic of pre-1950's cafes and restaurants this side of the Ebro...[for our first desayano (breakfast), we stumbled into what has to be Alice in Wonderland's flagrantly eccentric grandmother's cottage with so many knick-knacks everywhere they seem to be viciously nudging each other off the narrow shelves, not to mention the giant pumpkin gleefully crushing the upright piano!...and for dinner on our last evening, we braved a frenzied sardineria filled with loquacious university students, where the specialties are fried sardines and ham slices (jamon, jamon everywhere!), and the sizzling dishes fly around the crowded room with great voracity!]

I came for Goya in this city of contrariety and contrast, this old city of his childhood...I walked alone through the silent marbled square lit by silvery moonlight, a de Chirico nightscape of emptiness, to the Museo iberCaja Camon Aznar in the 16th century Pardo Palace, where Goya's engravings and some of his paintings are hung...
On the upper floor I was enveloped in darkness, surrounded by the spectral images from one of the most powerful and visionary artists - such exquisite intensity and nightmarish vibrancy on such pale diminutive sheets floating under barely lit glass cases that seem to go on forever - and I was haunted by mounting donkeys, by masked creatures in flowing dresses, by long-robed monkeys, by maniacal faces grimacing in the shadows, by charging bloodied bulls, by the violence of death and the simpering blur between dreams and reality...
There was no one there to wake me up...

***

If we had visited with less years to our belts, Zaragoza would have been the town to burn up in!...but instead we were witness to the more sedate charms, the opulent stateliness, the bourgeois glimmer of spanish cultura, and were all the more pleasantly surprised...

and we rose to this view every morning, the delicate spires of the basilica piercing the zaffre blue skies of Zaragoza, and always the resonant bells of Nuestra Senora del Pilar knelling ever so near...