Calle de Julián Romea

Julián Romea Yanguas was born in Murcia in 1813. His family had other studies in mind for him, but he ended up in the theater: in 1831 he entered Madrid’s School of Music and Dramatic Art and made his debut two years later. Romea brought a more restrained way of acting to the stage, far from the grandiloquence of Romanticism. He championed naturalness in gesture and speech, and set down those ideas in a treatise on delivery that became a manual at the Conservatory. From 1840 he directed the Teatro del Príncipe. He formed an artistic and marital partnership with the actress Matilde Díez, one of the great voices of her time. He died in Loeches in 1868. The city council dedicated this street to him in July 1880, already in the Chamberí expansion. It has an oddity: its starting point was never actually opened, because it ran up against the third reservoir of the Canal de Isabel II. The actor’s street begins, literally, against a wall of water.