Thursday, May 5^th

This morning—another beautiful day—we all walked to the Royal Palace for a look-around, but since Steve and Marty had other plans for the rest of they day, they sped ahead, agreeing to see us at dinner.

Bob did not think the front of the Royal Palace was right for a photo, but he did shoot one of the “back yard” and and another of a peacock who strutted around full-flagged seemingly enjoying the attention everyone gave him so much that he was still at it an hour or more later when we finished our tour.

The Palacio Real is the third largest in Europe and Philip V's version of Versaille, where he was born. It has over two thousand rooms and is still used on state occasions, but the current monarch, King Juan Carlos I, still uses it occasionally for state occasions. He wisely converted the fascist state that he inherited from Franco into a constitutional monarchy, so he is understandably popular. He and his wife Sophia live in more modest digs nearby.

The palace, which dates back only to the 18^th Century, is much more impressive than we expected it to be. Even Tosh, who had said something to the effect of seen-one-seen'em-all, found it to be tastefully done and even quite liveable for someone who might throw a dinner party for 140 guests. Of special interest was a room with a matching quartet of Stradivarius instruments (two violens, a miola, and a cello), and even the display of armor, which none of us expected to be interesting, turned out to be so, because it displayed several with almost lifelike manikins on horseback including one of Charles V in the same pose that Titian had painted of him. On the way out, Bob snapped a photo of the cathedral across the street, although we didn't visit it.

In the afternoon, after Tosh picked up a couple of items at a special shop that sells handmade tiles, we visited the recently renovated Museo Cerralbo, a turn-of-the-last-century century house that its owner, don Enrique de Aguilera y Gamboa (1845 – 1922) donated along with his vast collection of art to a grateful nation. With only 32 rooms, it's a much smaller version of the palace we'd seen in the morning, but in the end, not all that different. Like Isabella Gardnen in Boston had done with her mansion, the good don stipulated that it be kept just the way he'd left it, so we had an even better sense of how the aristocracy of his time actually lived than we did in the Royal Palace.

Part of the fun of touring the house, in addition to admiring its grand entrance and various objects of art, was chatting with the many attendants to understand some of the items on display. One in particular was a round metal object appropriately a yard in diameter and perhaps ten inches high. It took Tosh with her limited Spanish, Bob and an attendant with their animated gestures, and finally another attendant who spoke some English to explain that it was designed to hold hot coals and live under a table where gentlemen with long trousers and ladies with long skirts could put their feet to enjoy the heat it generated on cold winter evenings.