Calle de Quintiliano

The name pays tribute to Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, born around the year 35 in Calagurris, today’s Calahorra in La Rioja, when that land belonged to the Roman province of Tarraconensis. He went to Rome as a young man, where his father already taught the art of public speaking, and there became the most celebrated teacher of eloquence of his time. Vespasian even funded a chair of rhetoric solely for him, the first teacher paid from the imperial treasury. His mark fits into twelve books. The Institutio Oratoria gathers everything an orator needed to know, from the education of a child to the exact gesture of the hand before the court, and became a reference manual for the humanists of the Renaissance. He held that a good orator was first of all an honest man. The street was not always so named. It once appeared as calle de Viriato, and its sign was changed to undo the clash with another already existing in Madrid. The change sat well in Prosperidad, a neighbourhood of nineteenth-century grid where Latin names live alongside those of trades and cities.