Calle de Francisco Medrano

Francisco de Medrano, born in Seville around 1570, was a priest and one of the great imitators of Horace in Spanish. He left a brief, demanding body of work, some fifty sonnets and around thirty odes, with a classical serenity that sidestepped the excesses of the baroque rising around him. From those verses came a stoic pulse on the brevity of life, a theme his own death turned almost prophetic: he is said to have died suddenly, in 1607, during a gathering of friends, just after reading some lines aloud. His poetry slept for nearly three centuries until Dámaso Alonso rescued it. The street, barely eighty-five metres long, shares the Castillejos corner with other streets given over to letters and art.