Calle de Narciso Serra

The street bears the name of Narciso Sáenz Díaz Serra (Madrid, 1830 – Madrid, 1877), a playwright and poet of late Spanish Romanticism. Madrid council named it on 24 February 1878 — the exact date of his birthday — a few months after his death. Serra wrote more than forty stage works and cultivated high comedy and historical verse drama with Golden Age figures such as Quevedo and Cervantes. The street lies in the Pacífico neighbourhood, in the residential fabric that grew south of the park during the second half of the 19th century.

Madrid saw him born on 24 February 1830 and saw him die in 1877, in his house on the Calle de Segovia. His name was Narciso Sáenz Díaz Serra, but he signed his works with just two words: Narciso Serra. He wrote more than forty stage works and cultivated high comedy and historical verse drama. His greatest success came in 1861 with El loco de la guardilla, which imagined Cervantes in his hard years of poverty. The play was a triumph: fifty-two performances in a single season and nine printed editions before 1889. Life had demanded his body as well as his pen. In 1854 he joined a military uprising and fell wounded at Vicálvaro; years later a hemiplegia paralysed his left side and left him in a wheelchair, yet he kept publishing to the end. He was buried in the Sacramental de Santa María, and one of the cords of the coffin was held by José Zorrilla. The council gave his name to this Pacífico street on 24 February 1878, the day he would have marked his birthday.

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