New York, NY, Estados Unidos : Alfred A. Knopf, c1992

575 p. ; 25 cm

With all the wit and brio of his acclaimed writings on art, with all the humane passion of his best-selling account of the settlement of Australia, The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes now brings to life one of the world's most fabled cities. Barcelona is the dramatic history of the alluring metropolis -in relation to Catalunya, to the rest of Spain, and to Europe and America- over fifteen hundred years of civic existence. Barcelona was already a great city with a Mediterranean empire when Madrid was a dry little village on the road to nowhere -or so Catalans would have you believe - and an extraordinary overlay of peoples and cultures, attitudes, hopes, fantasies, and illusions has been successively imposed upon it. Hughes's narrative recounts the overlapping stories of Iberians, Visigoths, Muslims, Jews, and Christians, of monks and ruthless knights, mystics and hardfisted merchants, anarchists and monarchists, tricksters and artists. Hughes's masterful work is keyed to the very stones of Barcelona, especially the central excitement of its surviving Gothic architecture - a complete medieval city enclosed in an enormous nineteenth century grid of avenues, blocks, and housing that also frames Europe's most remarkable Art Nouveau palaces, apartments, and offices. --

0-394-58027-3

Incluye : Bibliografía : p. 543-552 ; Indice : p. 553-574 ; Créditos de las ilustraciones : p. 575. Nota acerca del autor y del libro