Sevilla’s third Noche en Blanca is TONIGHT. Organised by @SevillaSeMueve, the 2014 edition of this all-night cultural event is the most amibitious to date with more than 100 spaces participating, including theatre, music, boutiques, galleries, cinema, gastronomy, walking tours and much more.
Have a great White Night everyone!
Noche en Blanco Programme
Twitter hashtag: #nocheenblancoSEV
La Revuelta is Sevilla’s newest multi-functional cultural space. Part art gallery, part bookshop, and venue for wine tastings, literary and cultural events, courses and workshops and much more, it’s the brainchild of local writer, journalist and wine expert Javier Compás. The space is bright, open and welcoming with exposed brick walls and high ceilings. It also has kitchen facilities.
If you live in Sevilla you can become a member for 12€ a month and take advantage of discounts and first options for limited-space events. For visitors it’s a unique spot to check out for books, art and wines. Just off the Plaza del Pan in the first “vuelta” of the serpentine calle Siete Revueltas.
La Revuelta
Siete Revueltas, 33
Tel 954 21 08 06
Open: 10.00 – 14.00 / 17.00 – 20.00
Closed Sunday
Website: Redvuelta.com
This is a reblog/guest post by my friend Peter @SVQconcierge about our recent visit to the Antiquarium for a very special wine tasting (words are his, pics are mine). Many thanks to Cotidian Vitae for the invitation!
As all you erudite folks probably already know, Seville was in antiquity a Roman city, probably the most important in Western Europe outside of Italy itself. It’s official name from the time of Julius Caesar was “Julia Romana”, but as often happens it was the city’s older name, Hispalis, which remained in popular use, and is preserved in altered form in the modern name. It was an important trading, manufacturing and administrative centre with extensive commercial links with Rome, exporting wine, oil and fish products back to the Imperial capital.
But what was daily life like in Hispalis during the six centuries of Roman domination? Recently my friend Shawn @azaharSevilla and I were lucky enough to be invited to a rather special wine tasting event at Gastrosol, atop the Metropol Parasol. It was put on by the people responsible for Cotidiana Vitae (Daily Life) at Italica, the well-preserved Roman residential city at Santiponce, just outside Seville. Roman wines were provided by Baetica, who have done excellent work in recreating the styles of wines that would have been drunk in those far off times, drawing on the knowledge of winemakers, historians and archaeologists to make them as authentic as possible.
First though, it was down into the basement for a tour of the Roman ruins discovered when work to redevelop the site of the old market in Plaza Encarnación began back in the nineties. The ruins are now a well restored and preserved archaeology museum with some fascinating things to see. These include a fish salting plant that must have been a smelly neighbour for the residents, a house with an unusual (to me at least) raised platform for dining set into a semi-circular alcove, restored mosaics, and some crude gaming tables, as well as glimpses of the stratification (new bits built over old bits) of the site as it developed.
Then it was time to go upstairs for the wine tasting. Our hosts, Manuel León Béjar and Alejandro Vera had chosen four wines for us to sample, Mulsum (fermented with honey), Sanguis (steeped with rose petals), Antinoo (steeped with violets), and Mesalina (flavoured with cinnamon, and named for the wife of the Emperor Claudius), which became very popular in the later Roman Empire. It’s not really known how close these are to the Roman originals, especially as many of the old grape varieties have sadly disappeared, but extensive research into the wine making techniques of the time and descriptions of the grapes that were used gives us considerable confidence, and the use of the various flavourings is well attested to by writers and commentators of the time.
Now, I have to admit that I’m not really a wine expert, so for proper tasting notes and pairings I’m going to send you over to these good people (the notes are in Spanish), but I will say that it was a fascinating experience, and that the wines were quite distinctive compared to modern ones. My favourites were the Mulsum, which did have a definite tang of honey without being overly sweet, and the Mesalina, which was the most intensely flavoured, and was apparently mainly used at the end of, or even after, the meal. Maybe next time we’ll get a complete Roman banquet, though I’m still not convinced about the advantages of eating lying down.
For more information about activities at Italica, including tasting events, you can visit the Cotidiana Vitae website.
Originally posted on the Seville Concierge blog.
In October 2008 I did a fabulous long-weekend road trip with my friend Susan, from Sevilla along the Costa de la Luz to Bolonia and, after a quick side trip to buy knickers at M&S in Gibraltar, we went on to Málaga because my friend Agustín told me I HAD to eat at Andrés Maricuchi. This was my first, and very brief, visit to Málaga and after lunch and visiting the Picasso museum we stopped for tea and cake near the Roman amphitheatre, which was still being excavated at the time. And for some reason there was a massive octopus draped over a small viewing area.
Apparently the giant octopus is a legend told by Pliny the Elder about an incident that took place when Málaga was a part of the Roman Empire and was an important producer and exporter of garum, or fish paste. During the night this giant octopus would drag itself across the beach and eat the stored fish paste. They tried to catch it with dogs, which it slapped aside like so many mosquitos, and so they also put up barriers around it, but it escaped by jumping into a tree and then over the barriers. It was finally killed by many harpoons … well, that is the story in a nutshell.
So imagine my surprise when I was walking over to the Contemporary Arts Museum during my recent holiday in Málaga and, looking up, spotted a decidedlly worse-for-wear Mr Pulpo sprawled across the balcony of what looked like an abandoned building near the port. I thought this was a very sad way for this impressive specimen to have ended up. But it was even sadder when my friend Victor (@welovemalaga) sent me the photo below this morning on Twitter. Not only had Mr Pulpo been unceremoniously pushed over the balcony but they’d cut all his legs off! Why?? 🙁
