Calle de Piamonte

In the Justicia district, at the edge of Chueca, there is a street whose name came from the Italian Alps. Calle de Piamonte was straight and wide, good for troops to muster before it became a home for the aristocracy. The name comes from a camp: in 1639 the troops of the Marquis of Leganés camped here on returning from a campaign in Piedmont, leaving the name behind. Another version credited it to the arrival of Marie Louise of Savoy, wife of Philip V, but Texeira’s 1656 map already shows the street, well before that reign. The street grew stately, with the French embassy on one corner and palaces around it. Its most notable chapter came at number 2 in 1907, when the Socialist Party bought the old ducal palace of Béjar and turned it into the Casa del Pueblo, opened by Pablo Iglesias in 1908. It became the most important in Spain, with a library, a school, a cooperative and a theatre hall for 4,000 people. The Franco regime shut it down in 1939 and the building came down in 1953. Today only a discreet plaque recalls what stood there.