In fact, Hughes speculates that since of Wilfred, the presence of healthy, bouyant hair has become a signifier of prowess: "The immense bigotis (mustaches) and patillas (muttonchop whiskers) sported by Barcelonese industrialists 1000 years later may, in their walruslike magnificence, have seemed to some of their owners to claim the virtues of Guifreel Pelos."
The next 500 years proved an uplifting time for the Catalans. They were years of economic expansion and political self-assertion. Before Columbus ever sailed for the New World, the allied kingdoms of Catalunya and Aragon already possessed a far-ranging Mediterranean empire. And in what was to become a predictable pattern (aside from the city's prodigious capacity to re-invent itself time and time again), the citizens of the city fought for their rights during many nerve-fraught periods. Their successes are notable: the Usatges, for instance, dates from a century before the Magna Carta and is essentially a medieval charter of citizen's rights. In addition, the Consell de Cent (Council of One Hundred), in its day, was the oldest proto-democratic political body in Spain.
The book admiringly traces the evolution of these irrepressible democratic impulses, but they become less important when set beside the city's magnificently mixed-up architecture, an aggregate of different periods and styles. Architecture is the second of Barcelona's most enduring features after democracy, and fittingly enough, Hughes treats this subject at length (he is an art critic, after all).
Hughes's starting point is simple: architecture is a form of political expression invariable available only to those in power. It provides a kind of ready-made syntax that allows a political institution to represent its power through the planning of a city, or the construction of a building.
By acting as a symbol, a building can resonate with much greater force in the cultural consciousness; it is like an empty vessel that has been filled with a culturally-endowed meaning. During the occupation of Barcelona by the Bourbons in the eighteenth century, for example, the construction of the Ciutadella (the Citadel of Barcelona) became a hated symbol of Bourbon tyranny.
From the Roman walls built 20 centuries ago to the weird and wonderful creations of Gaudi, Hughes spends much of the book recounting the history in order to explain the architecture--examining the roots in order to look more closely at the tree, as he might put it. Much of the most penetrating commentary--as well as some of the funniest apercus--is in the second half of the book.
This is where Hughes' obvious talents as an art historian consistently convince and impress us. The sheer force of the narrative that Hughes crafts from the most basis elements of the city--its buildings--arrives in the sensual pleasure of the writing. He takes on the architecture of the Eixample (the enlargement of the city which occurred in the ninteenth century--like Domenech and Gaudi--are never separated from the cultural context of Catalan modernisme and the anarchists' movements of the 1890's.
Throughout, Hughes adroitly analyzes the architectural syntax of the city by way of its ideological underpinnings. What we discover is that, more often than not, the Catalan drive for self-definition has been projected and voiced through the urban landscape of Barcelona itself.