The Sevillian writer and journalist Eva Díaz Pérez will publish on October 22 Seville. Biography of the Golden City (The Sphere of Books), a volume that addresses the Andalusian capital through literature, historical research, and a critical lens. It is neither a guide nor a panegyric: Seville itself takes the role of narrator, with its greatness and its cracks.
The work presents the city as a changing enigma, different in every view. In that spirit, the author claims the memory architecture to read streets, squares and courtyards where centuries of urban life overlap, and where splendor and the common places that have so often simplified it coexist.
A biography that lifts layers of time
The story goes through overlapping layers of the past: from the remains of a Roman temple to a Renaissance palace, passing through the square where the autos-da-fé were held and the memory of the typographic workshop associated with the first printing press that traveled to America.
The remains of a great mosque and the plans, real and literary, that refer to names like Cervantes or Cernuda, authors who grafted part of their biography and work onto Seville.
The temporal arc is wide: from the echoes of the Ligustino Lake to the Seville of the discoveries, from the Andalusian minarets to the Baroque palaces, and from the poets of '27 to the contemporary city.
A walk to present the book
As a preview, the author organized a tour of the center that started from the terrace of the Hotel England, where he described episodes and scenes that run through the pages of the volume.
This proposal, conceived to “read the city” at street level through the prism of memory, was completed with its passage through Today in Seville (Salomón Hachuel), a space in which he shared the keys to the project and his working method.
- San Francisco square: civic heart with the Renaissance Town Hall by Diego de Riaño and the scene of autos-da-fé.
- El Salvador: memory of the first major mosque and traces of early Seville.
- Bread Square: link with the family of Luis Cernuda and his literary universe.
- Typographic workshop: a reference to the Sevillian printing press that connected with the jump to America.
- Pinelo House: headquarters of the Royal Sevillian Academy of Fine Letters, library and courtyard from the 16th century.
Plaza de San Francisco, Cervantes and the House of the Pinelo
In the Plaza de San Francisco, that great civic navel, the Renaissance Town Hall of Diego de Riaño, in an environment where gallows were located and Inquisition ceremonies were held, still present in urban memory.
In that area was located the prison where, according to tradition, he was imprisoned. Miguel de Cervantes and where he would have sketched the first lines of Don Quixote; for the author, Seville functioned as a laboratory of the human condition.
The itinerary made a stop in El Salvador, with the memory of the first major mosque, and in the Plaza del Pan, linked to the Luis Cernuda's familyThe group then went into the Pinelo House, now the headquarters of the Royal Sevillian Academy of Fine Letters.
This palace, with its 16th-century courtyard and quiet halls, houses a library where the smell of wood mingles with that of ancient spines; an enclave that bears witness to the transition from the old city of narrow streets and lattices to a Seville open to merchants from Flanders, Genoa and France.
Typographers, Little Birds, and the Lost Trail of Cromberger
The street birdies It owes its name to a popular 19th-century tavern that replaced the old name of Calle del Impresor; a plaque still remains commemorating that the German's workshop was set up there in 1511. Jácome Cromberger.
Despite this vestige, in the city there is no material collection of that printing press, unlike Antwerp, where that of Christopher Plantin still stands, an essential reference for the history of the European typographic profession.
Voices, contrasts and symbols of a plural city
The book proposes that Seville itself be protagonist of its history, an approach that is in line with the tradition of urban biographies such as Ackroyd's on London.
The narrative is built with objects, sensations and characters: a disaster tile, heat as an element that deterred sieges, and a gallery with Murillo, Velázquez, Antonio Machado, Luis Cernuda, Cervantes or Chaves Nogales.
All this underlines the dualities that have run through the city since ancient times: from devotion to nonconformism, from the conventual to the Babylonian, and from a real river to an imagined one that have conditioned their identity.
- Devotees and heterodox
- Officer and transgressor
- Sacred and profane
- Splendor and misery
Reading adds a daily displacement through neighborhoods and times, from Old Town to Rochelambert on line 24 of Tussam, like someone following the thread of a mental map accumulated over centuries.
The author and the calendar
Eva Diaz Perez, a graduate in Information Sciences and a Culture editor for the Seville edition of El Mundo, won the Ciudad de Huelva Journalism Award in 1998 and is the author of titles such as El polvo del camino (2001), Memoria de cenizas (2005) and Hijos del Mediodía (2006, El Público Narrative Award).
Member since 2023 of the Royal Seville Academy of Fine LettersWith this project, the writer continues her research on urban identity, now crystallized in a choral, literary and critical biography of the Andalusian capital.
Seville. Biography of the Golden City will be available in bookstores on October 22; in addition to presentations and talks, an event is planned at the Book Fair on Sunday the 26th to share with readers the keys to this proposal.
With a vocation for street-level chronicle and a historical perspective, the work interweaves memory and present to show both monumental and domestic Seville, from the most well-known symbols to less-traveled corners, drawing a moving portrait of a city that refuses to be fixed in a single image.
