Madrid en el Prado

Madrid and the Prado Museum have maintained an intimate, profound, and sometimes invisible relationship for centuries. This book invites you to discover it through a captivating journey through the city and the museum's galleries, where paintings, buildings, and historical events converse with one another like pieces of a single narrative. From vanished palaces and demolished convents to cafés, promenades, and inns now forgotten, the reader will explore a Madrid that no longer exists, but which lives on in the Prado's collection. Each chapter is a stroll —a leisurely wander— in which the works housed in the Prado Museum serve as a guiding thread, leading you through the city and revealing Madrid figures such as the painters Rosario Weiss and Teresa Nicolau; historical events like the Esquilache Riots and the Auto-da-fé held in the Plaza Mayor in 1680; buildings of vanished Madrid and the works that once adorned them; and episodes experienced within the museum itself, such as the cyclone that devastated the city in 1886 or the fake fire fabricated by a journalist at the end of the 19th century. Told with an intimate voice, full of profound knowledge and genuine affection for the city, Sonia Taravilla invites us to see Madrid with new eyes and to return to the Prado as one returns home. Because its works are not only the great masters but also the Madrileños we once were and those we still are.