Barcelona The Great Enchantress (Directions) | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Hughes
Publisher: National Geographic
Category: Book
List Price: $10.95
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Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 173188
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 4.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 1426201311
Dewey Decimal Number: 946
EAN: 9781426201318
ASIN: 1426201311
Publication Date: September 18, 2007
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Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: This book is brand new and in mint condition. Available in stock for immediate dispatch. We are a UK Seller.
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Product Description
Robert Hughes has been a regular visitor to Barcelona since the 1960s and published a book about the city in 1992 that was quickly hailed as a classic. In Barcelona the Great Enchantress, Hughes crafts a more personal tale of his nearly forty-year love affair with the Spanish metropolis, one of the most vibrant and fascinating cities in Europe.
Beginning with a vivid description of his wedding in the splendid medieval ceremonial chamber in Barcelona's city hall, Hughes launches into a lively account of the history, art, and architecture of the storied city. He tells of architectural treasures abounding in 14th-century Barcelona, establishing it as one of Europe's great Gothic cities, while Madrid was hardly more than a cluster of huts. The city spawned such great artists as Antoni Gaudi, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Casals. Hughes's deep knowledge of the city is evident—but it's his personal reflections of what Barcelona, its people, and its storied history and culture have meant to him over the decades that sets Barcelona the Great Enchantress apart from all others' books.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Discover a place which becomes a true home town April 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This small volume overflows with passion for Barcelona's art and architecture, subjects Hughes generously expands to include cultural history, food, and politics, as well as sketches of his personal engagement with Barcelona's people and the creative life-force of the city. Hughes writes, "You are lucky if not too late in life, you discover a second city other than your place of birth which becomes a true home town."
 An Interesting but Opinionated Read January 1, 2008
This book is the perfect length for the plane flight from America to Barcelona. It is also a bit choppy and has been fairly obviously edited from its much larger original text. If you enjoy art and architecture, you'll probably want more than the tidbits that this book has to offer; if you don't, it's not accessible nor well-written enough to give you a fundamental understanding of what you are looking at when you are on the ground in Barcelona. It's very much a memoir or an autobiography, so read it with the understanding that what you like and what Robert Hughes likes may be very different things. As a traveler who likes to research the places he is going pretty extensively before I travel, I found this book fairly lacking in interesting details and far too personal for my taste, but as far as I can tell it is the only non-travel-guide book of its kind out there on the ancient city of Catalonia. In short, I would check this book out of a local library for the trip, as its length fits nicely into the trans-Atlantic flight doldrums, but don't spend the money purchasing it for life, unless you're like me and you plan on putting it on your bookshelf so everyone can see how snooty and worldly of a traveler you are.
A quick introduction to a fascinating city June 6, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I brought this book along with me on my honeymoon to Paris and Barcelona and started reading it on our overnight train to Barcelona. I finished it in about four hours of reading, closing it just before getting in a cab to our Barcelona hotel.
Barcelona: The Great Enchantress is a page turner, especially if you are planning a trip there. In fact, if you are planning a trip there, this book is mandatory reading. It will pump you up for your visit like no tour guide can do. It doesn't contain a lot of in-depth advice for tourists or a careful history of Barcelona's rich architectural history (Hughes has another book for that, although I have not read it). What it does is whet your appetite.
Read this book and get excited about one of the most amazing cities in Europe! This is travel writing at its best and most engaging.
 The heart of Catalonia. May 21, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
A brief sample history of Barcelona and its effect on art, architecture, and the people. Hughes fell in love with this city and became a frequent visitor to the second largest city in Spain. Barcelona is indeed a famous city and one of the holdouts to the Franco regime in the Spanish CIvil War. Perhaps Hughes through his wording tried to convey his love of the city in his writings. However this book came across as a sketchy summary history of this great city.
This is an OK read on this great city. If you want more history, check out Hughes earlier book on this city.
An Abridged Version of "Barcelona" June 26, 2006
8 out of 10 found this review helpful
Which is not a bad thing, since the original 574-page version, written in 1992 just after the Barcelona Olympics, is too verbose. This version appears to have benefited from aggressive editing, deleting much of the generally irrelevant material on Barcelona's history and Catalan literature and art, which may generously be described as undistinguished.
Hughes' real strength lies in architectural criticism, and here he shines. Readers who share that interest may well want to buy the 1992 version which discusses that topic in depth.
Neither book, unfortunately, has a sufficient number of pictures.
There is an excellent VHS tape of Barcelona [ASIN: 6303209777] that combines both ground and aerial footage. Well worth purchasing.
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