Tarracco, as the Roman once called our new home was founded over two thousand years ago.  The Roman expertise in choosing strategic locations and brilliance in city planing is evidenced by the fact that so many of todays largest European cities were first layed out by them; Paris, London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Budapest, Vienna, Bratislava, Zürich, Heidelberg my hometown, just to name a few of the more surprising ones.  Todays Tarragona reveals the cleverness and persistence of Roman engineering and design in many ways: in small details of columns and carved stones recycled into medieval buildings, stubbornly standing roman arches, walls and towers, but to me most impressively in the underlying structure of the city's current layout.  

The entire medieval city core of quirky crooked buildings forming canyons of unpredictably winding streets that sit on three enormous platforms that were once  only three structures:

1  A huge horse race track whose long oval can still clearly seen in some parts and intuited by the large central square sits on a mere third of what for five hundred years was a spectacle of horse drawn mayhem claiming more lives than the gladiator fights.  While walking down a two thousand year old vaulted tunnel that once served to funnel the crowds underground to efficiently fill the 12 000 seats  I could imagine the roar of the crowd, smell of their food and wine of a culture that echos till our day.  

2  The Current Cathedral and cloister, impressive in it's 12th century mansions of the early Renaissance and palatial homes of the 17th and 18th century crowd uncomfortably along with the former jewish neighborhood onto the platform formerly housing gardens and a single structure:  the temple to emperor Augustus.

3  While the third platform, formerly locked in rigid geometry of decorative fountains is lost entirely under charming medieval chaos held in tightly by the remnants of roman walls and arches.  

Every twist of cobblestone streets reveals an angle worth painting, making it difficult to settle on where to begin for worry of not getting to around to them all. I particularly enjoy puzzling over which a repurposing of a structure belongs to what era.  Hulking flat faces of walls have been pierced by flirtatious renaissance windows. Somber gothic arches have been closed in perhaps in times of the napoleonic wars.  Roman memorial texts are turned sideways and used as cornerstones for a basilica dedicated to the early christians slaughtered to cheering crows in the very stone round where it now sits awkwardly of center; perhaps mocking the formal geometry of Roman cruelty.  Cruel, slave owning as they certainly were it was impossible not to admire the scale and ambition of roman design as we saddled up to the bar in a hip little club housed in a two millennia old vault echoing some fabulous flamenco jazz fusion.  

In proper Catalan fashion, the club owner was equally proud of roman architecture and medieval peasant ingenuity that resulted in  a hole in the  tall arced ceiling just large enough to,well, sit over.  (I'll write about scatological humor in a future Catalan Christmas post) I envy local archeologists for the endless questions millennia of very human occupation pose.. pondering such mysteries would be a career choice nearly as exciting as artist has been.  For now I'm thrilled a the prospect of doing some visual archeology exploring the rich layering of colors and textures of our new home in Catalunya.