Calle de Quintana

The name evokes Manuel José Quintana (1772–1857), a neoclassical poet born in Madrid, pupil of Meléndez Valdés and Jovellanos, who kindled the resistance against Napoleon with verse and proclamations during the Peninsular War. His patriotic odes earned him a place in the Royal Spanish Academy. The episode that fixed him in memory took place on 25 March 1855, in the Senate hall. Quintana had been tutor to Isabella II, and the queen herself set a crown of laurel on his head in an act without precedent in the country’s letters. The poet died two years later, already hailed as a national voice. The street was born with the layout of the Argüelles district in the nineteenth century and descends from Princesa toward the paseo del Pintor Rosales, crossing Ferraz and Tutor. In the early twentieth century it was a broad street of aristocratic homes, dotted with palaces and residences of infantas, in what was then a bourgeois extension facing the open country to the west.