Calle de Alenza

The name recalls Leonardo Alenza Nieto, a painter born in Madrid in 1807 and dead in this same city, of tuberculosis, in 1845, before turning thirty-eight. He looked to the late, dark Goya and followed his trail: market scenes, beggars, people of the outskirts. He was the painter-chronicler of the poorest Madrid, the one that did not sit for drawing-room portraits. A Romantic through and through, Alenza ended up laughing at Romanticism itself. In his Satire of Romantic Suicide, a gaunt man throws himself off a rock with a dagger in his hand, surrounded by the emblems of the tormented artist. He lived short and hard, and that brief life fed his legend as a doomed painter. The street climbs from Ríos Rosas to Raimundo Fernández Villaverde. For much of the twentieth century it saw a coming and going of travelers through the Continental Auto bus station, which ran here until 1999. Today it shares its pavement with the School of Mines and its museum, in a quieter stretch than those departures northward.