Calle de Antonio Flores

Barely sixty-eight meters separate Serrano Anguita from Sagasta, and into that tiny stretch of the Justicia neighborhood fits the whole of calle de Antonio Flores. Do not look for it on a nineteenth-century map: it was opened in the early years of the twentieth, when the area between Alonso Martínez and Sagasta was reorganized. Antonio Flores Algovia was born in Elche in 1818 and became a journalist through one masthead after another. What earned him a place in literature was his writing of manners. Where Mesonero Romanos observed the people of Madrid from a certain distance, Flores went into the streets of Barquillo and Lavapiés and copied their speech faithfully, in sound and vocabulary, without demeaning anyone or dressing them in romanticism. His major work, Ayer, hoy y mañana (1853), lays out scenes of manners across three eras and still serves to study the society of Isabella II’s reign.

At the tribute marking the centenary of Flores held in Elche in 1918, both Benito Pérez Galdós and Jacinto Benavente endorsed the initiative to place a plaque in his native city. The gesture united two writers of very different generations and styles in the same recognition of a chronicler of everyday manners who, in life, had been an employee of the royal household and a favorite of Queen Isabel II — an unusual combination in the literary bohemia of the nineteenth century.