The Rough Guide to Barcelona 8 (Rough Guide Travel Guides)

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Baroque and Neoclassical furniture contrasting with the varied Art Deco and

modernista

holdings.The highlight here has to be the four-metre-high stained-

glass window of 1900, depicting the

sardana

(a circle dance) being performed

in a scene that looks back to medieval times for its inspiration. The entire

latter half of the gallery concentrates on contemporary Catalan

disseny

(design), from chairs to espresso machines, lighting to sink taps, though there’s

not much context provided and in the end it’s a bit like walking through a

furnishings store and not being allowed to buy anything. English-language

notes are provided if you’d prefer to put some names to goods and objects.

Museu Textil i d’Indumentaria

The latest collection to arrive at the palace is that of the

Museu Textil i

d’Indumentaria

(

www.museutextil.bcn.cat), the textile and clothing

museum formerly located in La Ribera. Its layout was undecided at the time of

writing, but the extensive collection presents selected items from late-Roman

fabrics to 1930s cocktail dresses, while demonstrating the art and technique

behind cloth-making, embroidery, lace and tapestry work.There are also pieces

by Spanish and Catalan designers of the 1970s to the current day, like those of

Pedro Rodríguez (1895–1990), the first

haute couture

designer to establish a

studio in Barcelona, and Catalan designer Antonio Miró, who has recently

donated pieces to the museum.

Pavellons Güell

A block east of the Palau Reial gardens,Avinguda Pedralbes heads north off the

Diagonal up to the Monestir de Pedralbes. Just a couple of minutes up the

avenue, you’ll pass Gaudí’s remarkable

Pavellons Güell

on your

left.As

an early

test of his capabilities, Antoni Gaudí was asked by his patron, Eusebi Güell, to

rework the entrance, gatehouse and stables of the Güell summer residence, on

a large working estate which was sited well away from the filth and unruly mobs

of downtown Barcelona.The summer house itself was later given to the royal

family, and rebuilt as the Palau Reial, but the brick-and-tile stables and

outbuildings survive as Gaudí created them, frothy, whimsical affairs with more

than a Moorish touch to them. The

trencadís

(broken tile mosaics) on the

minarets were first experimented with here by Gaudí, a technique he then used

for the rest of his life.

Here be dragons

The slavering beast on Gaudí’s dragon gate at the Pavellons Güell is not the

vanquished dragon of Sant Jordi (St George), the Catalan patron saint, but the one that

appears in the Labours of Hercules myth, a familiar Catalan theme in the nineteenth

century. Gaudí’s design was based on a work by the Catalan renaissance poet Jacint

Verdaguer, a friend of the Güell family, who had reworked the myth in his epic poem,

L’Atlàntida

– thus, the dragon guarding golden apples in the Gardens of Hesperides is

here protecting instead an orange tree (considered a more Catalan fruit). Gaudí’s gate

indeed can be read as an homage to Verdaguer, with its stencilled roses representing

those traditionally given to the winner of the Catalan poetry competition, the Jocs

Floral, which the poet won in 1877.

THE NORTHERN SUBURBS

Pavellons Güell