“This is a country built upon 40 years of silence,” said Pau Rubio, a Barcelona journalist who is researching his grandfather’s and great-uncle’s experiences in the civil war. The conflict - and the long aftermath of Franco’s dictatorship - left scars that few Spanish care to scratch. There’s one obvious reason for the apparent amnesia when it comes to the civil war. The wall of the church is heavily pocked with shrapnel damage someone has scrawled: “Always remember the victims of Fascist regimes.”Īs for Orwell, the only reference is a small square named after him, which in any case is known locally by another name, “Plaça del Tripi”, or “Acid Square”: the Plaça de George Orwell, complete with Big Brother-ish surveillance cameras, is where Barcelona’s youth kick back on illicit substances. In January 1938, the square and its church were hit by a bomb dropped by Mussolini’s air force 42 people were killed, many of them children. The most visible legacy of the war is tucked away in one of the city’s quietest squares, the Plaça Sant Felip Neri near La Seu.
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