Calle de Santa María

The name came from a small Marian shrine at the corner with Calle del León. The image, brought from Italy, showed the Virgin watching over the sleeping Child while Saint John the Baptist, finger to his lips, asked for silence so as not to wake him. Hence its first name: the Virgin of Silence. The second name came from a miracle. Catalina Flores had been left paralyzed after childbirth and prayed nine days running before the little shrine. On the ninth she recovered her movement, and from then on it was the Virgin of the Novena. Madrid’s actors took her as their patron and carried her in procession to the church of San Sebastián, where she is still venerated. At number 46 of this street the playwright Leandro Fernández de Moratín, one of the great figures of Spanish theatre, was born in 1760.