Travel Post #19: Meandering in Barcelona

Dateline: Tuesday, October 30, 2012. Barcelona. Walking About - Here, There, and Everywhere

Our first formal stop of the day was the Picasso Museum, a museum housing many of his early works (some of my favorites). Unfortunately, no photos were allowed, but I've done a link to the museum site if you want to check it out.

On our aimless walking tour, we came upon a rather large church. Turns out it was the Cathedral de Barcelona, a pretty big deal cathedral.

As we ambled about, we stumbled upon a little art gallery, Villa del Arte. Their featured artist, Fernando Alday, made me weak in the knees. I didn't buy any of his art, but I did buy his current catalog of works. For my many art friends, especially those who work in mixed media, please follow the link to Fernando's website. He works using old ephemera (manuscripts, book bindings, letters), which is torn up and used to form his images.

I've saved the best for last (well, Fernando was pretty special). Our last stop was the Museu Frederic Mares; we were there until they kicked us out at closing. If you're wondering who Frederic Mares was (I'd never heard of him), he was a COLLECTOR. Since I'm a collector, I was intrigued just reading about this museum. The first couple of floors house an important collection of Spanish religious sculptures dating from the 12th to the 18th centuries. (I saw couple of Santos that I swear Tory Brokenshire had created!). As for the collections, well, my photos don't do them justice. There were rooms upon rooms of items he collected, all arranged beautifully in cases. His collection includes toys, automatons, pipes, cameras, watches, fans, playing cards, eyeglasses, cigars, milagros and other religious artifacts. My mind swims thinking back to everything we saw.

The collections:

We were exhausted by the end of the day, but managed to limp our way over for a quick peek at the La Rambla, but we'll save a more thorough investigation of that for another day.