Another Beautiful Day

It’s a beautiful day, though it’s cool when the breeze blows and you’re in the shade. We head down Grácia and walk through Catalunya square and down the pedestrian street, Ave. del Portal de l’Àngel. We realize we’ve never been able to enjoy this area before because of the crowds. There are still lots of people but not the suffocating numbers. We stand and watch some good buskers playing horns, and the buildings are beautiful.

We keep getting distracted and it seems to takes us forever to locate the museum we’ve gone by a thousand times in the past. It’s right next to the cathedral and in a lovely Renaissance home. Frederic Mares was a sculptor and capacious collector of art who donated his collection to the city.

In the museum we walk through Roman artifacts, Medieval Christian iconography—more gruesome passion/crucifix sculptures than one can imagine!

Then we wander through an endless number of everyday items: woman’s fans, keys, locks, pins, cameras, pipes, eye glasses, canes, funereal memorials, stamps, baptismal fonts.

And on and on. He is so capacious and varied in his collection we spent the bulk of our time fretting over his mental health. One guide book I had read advices the visitor to “keep moving” and we held to this just to get out in two plus hours ready for lunch feeling moderately pummeled by all the objects we had encountered.