Calle de Barbieri

It climbs between calle de las Infantas and calle de Augusto Figueroa, a step from Chueca square. Today you can cross it end to end, but until 1853 you hit a wall: it was a dead-end lane that stopped at the barracks. For more than two centuries it was called calle del Soldado, the soldier’s street, and no one agreed on why. One explanation points to the Spanish Guards' barracks, also called “del Soldado”; the other, murkier, to a crime in the seventeenth century. A foundling home and, from 1818, a women’s prison also stood here. Few streets so short hold so much penance. The present name came from a local resident: Francisco Asenjo Barbieri, the composer who defined the grand zarzuela of the nineteenth century, author of El barberillo de Lavapiés, and an obsessive musicologist whose songbook of the Royal Palace is still consulted. At number 12, Casa Salvador has held on since 1941, with a legendary clientele: Ava Gardner is said to have climbed onto a table one night to dance.