Calle de la Reina

Barely two hundred meters, running parallel to the Gran Vía, hold more history than one would expect. The name recalls the procession of 13 December 1639, when Elisabeth of Bourbon, wife of Philip IV, presided over the moving of the Cristo de la Paciencia to the newly built Capuchin convent. It is worth pinning down the right queen: several sources confuse her with Margaret of Austria, who died in 1611, so it can only be Elisabeth. At number 8 stood the Maserano Palace, home in the early 19th century to General Abel Hugo and his nine-year-old son Victor. The same building later housed the Fonda de Genieys, the most elegant French kitchen at court, where Rossini composed his Stabat Mater in 1831. On the same street stood the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Presentación, the Niñas de Leganés, which took in orphan girls and whose founding statutes gave an unsettling preference to the prettiest, deemed most at risk. The school fell in 1911 with the opening of the Gran Vía, which was about to change everything.

In 1831 Gioachino Rossini stayed at the Fonda de Genieys, set up in the former Palacio Maserano at number 8. The archpriest Manuel Fernández Varela, who had attended a performance of The Barber of Seville at the Teatro de la Cruz, commissioned a work of a devotional character from him. Rossini wrote the Stabat Mater during that stay in Madrid; the work was first performed in the church of San Felipe el Real. A plaque on Calle del Clavel number 3, at the corner of Calle de la Reina, commemorates the event.