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...begin with, an important town; the Roman capital of what is now Catalunya was farther south, at Tarragona. But Barcelona began to gain significance after the Roman Empire collapsed and the invading Visigoths took over, and it became a capital in the 9th century A.D., when Charlemagne's heirs conquered the city port, threw out the Arabs who had taken charge of it as the northern extension of the Arab conquest of Spain, and then in effect turned it over to a Catalan strongman, Wilfred the Hairy, the semilegendary founder of the Catalan state...
Good or bad? Will the Olympic slogan of "Faster, higher, stronger" metamorphose into "Dollars, hype, celebrity"? Will the remaining truly amateur events, such as archery and Greco-Roman wrestling, be marginalized even more? The challenge for the Olympic movement will be to strike a balance between the inevitable marketing excesses and that evanescent thing, the Olympic spirit...
...Arab women with them; they intermarried with Iberian ones. The conquering power became an indigenous one in short order, although the successive caliphs tended to retain a nostalgia for Baghdad. Out of the Moorish conquest grew the first unified culture Spain had seen since the collapse of the Roman Empire. It lasted until 1492, when Catholic armies, under Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, drove the last vestiges of Arab power back to North Africa. If you want to grasp why Spain, traditionally, is unique in Europe, you must begin with the fact that no other European country...
...prayer hall of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, for instance, designed its sublime forest of columns and horseshoe arches as a communal space without the hierarchical orientation of a Christian basilica, as befitted Islamic ritual -- but they also based its double-arch system on the design of Roman aqueducts. "You have taken something unique and turned it into something mundane," the Emperor Charles V is said to have remarked, on seeing the mosque converted into a Catholic church after the reconquista...
...architectural fragments included in this show -- capitals and bases from the 10th century caliphal period, for instance -- one sees the forms of Roman antiquity dissolving into the Islamic taste for allover pattern; eaten away by deep carving, a recognizably Ionic capital turns into a web of exquisite stone lace, a sort of architectural counterpart to the deeply incised ivory caskets and pyxes favored by the courts of al-Andalus. One of the most impressive bowls in this show, a deep conical form bearing on its inside surface a design of a Portuguese nao, or trading ship, so powerful...