Calle de Moratines

The plural on the sign is deliberate. It honors not one writer but two from the same family: Nicolás Fernández de Moratín and his son Leandro, father and son, both poets and playwrights of 18th-century Spanish neoclassicism. That is why Madrid remembers them together, in a single word. Nicolás championed a reformed kind of theater. Leandro brought that legacy to its peak with comedies such as El sí de las niñas, before going into exile as a Frenchified liberal. The street belongs to Las Acacias, in Arganzuela, ground won to the south of the city when its houses spread beyond the old center. Whoever walks it today, between Embajadores and the area around the paseo de la Esperanza, follows a line that names two generations of comic dramatists.