Calle de Argensola

Calle de Argensola was born of a demolition. In 1869 the convent of Santa Teresa came down, leaving a huge plot in the Justicia neighborhood over which the city council drew several new streets. At first this one was called Gutenberg; five years later it already bore the name Argensola. The surname honors Lupercio and Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola, brothers and Aragonese poets of the Golden Age who served the Court in Madrid. They wrote against the current of their time: while Góngora loaded his verse with Baroque obscurity, they looked to Horace and Martial, classical form and sober language. Lope de Vega joked that they seemed to have come down to Aragón to correct the Castilian of every other poet, and Cervantes praised them in La Galatea and in Don Quixote. Today the street runs north to south, from Fernando VI to Génova. At number 19 the painter Eduardo Arroyo was born in 1937.

The provisional name “de Gutenberg” has a material explanation: the convent of Santa Teresa, in its final years before demolition, housed a printing press in its premises. When the new street was opened, the sign recalled that industrial use. A few years later, the City Council replaced it with the name of the Argensola brothers, thus linking the same urban space to printing —⁠as a mechanical art⁠— and to two of the poets closest to the classical ideal of the Golden Age.