Calle de Rodríguez Marín

The man who gave his name to this street in El Viso collected proverbs by the thousand. Francisco Rodríguez Marín (Osuna, 1855 – Madrid, 1943) began as an Andalusian poet and folklorist, co-founded a society for gathering the popular lore of the south while still very young, and devoted his life to tracking the speech, songs and sayings of ordinary people. That attention to living language made him one of Spain’s great scholars of proverbs. His other passion was Cervantes. He edited and annotated Don Quixote again and again, chasing down every reference until he produced editions packed with notes that are still consulted. He directed the National Library for nearly two decades and, in old age, presided over the Royal Spanish Academy. During the Civil War he spent more than two years taking refuge in a village in Ciudad Real, and out of that seclusion came a book titled En un lugar de La Mancha, written in the very land Cervantes had imagined.