Calle de Manuel Silvela

This street preserves the surname of an intellectual 19th-century Madrid. It was named in 1895 in memory of Manuel Silvela y de Le Vielleuze, born in Paris in 1830 to Spanish parents and brother of Francisco Silvela, who would go on to head the Council of Ministers. Silvela practiced law from the age of twenty-one and twice chaired the Royal Academy of Jurisprudence. He was a deputy, a senator, and Minister of State under Cánovas del Castillo, as well as ambassador to France, the country where he had been born. Alongside the robe and the seat he wrote for newspapers, signing those pages as Velisla, an anagram of his surname. The street runs between Sagasta and Luchana, sharing a block with the Redemptorist convent and the church of Perpetuo Socorro.