Calle Antonio Rodríguez Villa

Antonio Rodríguez Villa (Madrid, 1843-1912) spent his life among old documents. Trained as an archivist, he earned his qualification in 1866 and still found time to graduate in Arts. His trade was to read old handwriting, date manuscripts, reconstruct what dust and centuries had made illegible. He traveled to London to catalog, alongside Pascual de Gayangos, the Spanish manuscripts of the British Museum. Back in Madrid he entered the Royal Academy of History, of which he became perpetual librarian. He wrote biographies of Joanna the Mad, of the Genoese Ambrosio Spínola who besieged Breda, and of General Pablo Morillo. Much of his work was not writing new history but saving the old: he copied and published unpublished texts sleeping in foreign libraries, such as the second part of Cabrera de Córdoba’s Historia de Felipe II. The calle de Antonio Rodríguez Villa traces its barely more than two hundred and fifty meters in El Viso, a neighborhood of Rationalist villas designed in the 1920s as a garden city.