Calle de Antonio Casero
Honours the poet and comic playwright Antonio Casero y Barranco (1874-1936), chronicler of the old working-class Madrid of street fairs and its dandies.
No one wrote the speech of the poorer quarters with a keener ear than Antonio Casero y Barranco, born in Madrid in 1874, who spent his childhood between the Maravillas district and Lavapiés. From those courtyards and street fairs he drew the matter of his verse and his sainetes, the short, popular sketches that filled Madrid’s stages at the turn of the century.
A trained business teacher, he soon swapped ledgers for rhymes. The sketches brought him fame and money, portraying ordinary people with humour and nostalgia: La gente del bronce, Los castizos, De Madrid al cielo. He became a city councillor in 1915. He died at his home on calle Carranza one Sunday in March 1936, aged sixty-two.
Here, on calle de Antonio Casero, his surname sits among the celestial names the Estrella neighbourhood took from the night sky.