Calle de Garcilaso

The street recalls Garcilaso de la Vega, born in Toledo around 1501 and dead in Nice in 1536. He served as a soldier to Charles V and fell while scaling an unprotected fortified tower in Provence, struck by a stone hurled from above. He was barely past thirty-five. What made him endure was not the sword but the ear. With his friend Juan Boscán he adapted the hendecasyllable and the forms of the Italian Renaissance —⁠the sonnet, the eclogue, the canción⁠— into Castilian, opening a new channel for poetry in Spanish. His verses appeared in print in 1543, after his death, and have been read ever since. His eclogues, peopled with shepherds and rivers, fixed a way of looking at the countryside that shaped generations. The street is a modern one. It runs through the Trafalgar neighborhood, from calle de Luchana to calle de Raimundo Lulio.