Word: catalonia
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...just some architectural veneer, Barcelona's whimsy echoes in the Catalan spoken here as well. For instance, in this capital of Catalonia common words begin with X's, and it's somehow endearing that you can buy candy in a xocolateria on your way to a sparkling wine bar--a xampanyeria--called Xampau Xampany. Moreover, a government-printed language textbook eachews the dry repetitions of "amo amas amat" that filled my high-school Latin primer and replaces them with two unclothed cartoon Catalans locked in a torrid embrace...
History provides no explanation, either. Francisco Franco, a rightist generalisimo who received aid from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in the early years of his four-decade-long dictatorship, tried to impose a rigid moralistic and nationalist ethos upon Spain. Liberal intellectuals and partisans of Basque, Galicia, and Catalonia culture bristled under Franco...
...athletes weren't the only ones piling up the medals in Barcelona. TIME's art critic Robert Hughes also excelled when he was awarded the first prize for literature in the Olimpiada Cultural. In a ceremony at the Palacio | de la Zarzuela, Hughes was honored by the government of Catalonia for his book Barcelona. The prize, which was presented by King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia of Spain, included a bronze Miro trophy...
That was a little how it felt as Barcelona, the often unshaven but designer- crazy capital of Catalonia, set flame to the Games of the 25th Olympiad. The occasion was a golden opportunity for presenting the city as a shiny new capital of a postnational world. It was also a quadrilingual glimpse into a multicultural future. Music at the celebrations that opened the Games came from an atlas of names -- Ryuichi Sakamoto, Angelo Badalamenti (of Twin Peaks fame), Andrew Lloyd Webber; Placido Domingo was followed by a sea of "living sculptures" designed by a man from the West Indies...
...most prominent country in the early going, however, had been one that did not march but made its presence felt at every turn: independent-minded Catalonia, which is determined to cast these as the Catalan, not the Spanish, Games. A longtime enemy of Castile, delighting in a language that Franco had banned, Barcelona was eager not just to show off its faster, higher, stronger ^ self -- reconstruction is almost as trendy as deconstruction here -- but to emphasize its distance from the Spain of myth, and of Madrid. FREEDOM FOR CATALONIA signs (in English) were draped from balconies and shoulders, and buttons...