Calle del Maestro Ripoll

The name recalls a teacher surnamed Ripoll, but the records have kept no trace of who he was or of the life that inspired it. The title “Maestro” does not pin down the trade with certainty either, so it is best left as is and not attributed to a specific figure. What there is memory of is a change of sign: the street was once called Matías Montero before recovering the teacher’s name, one of the many plaque changes that 20th-century Madrid went through. It runs short, barely a stretch between Vitruvio and Carbonero y Sol, among the Rationalist villas that made El Viso an experiment in urban gardening in the 1930s. Whoever walks it treads one of the highest and quietest parts of the city.