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desire for entropy. Barcelona had resisted the caudillo. Bad idea. There would be money for cement works outside the city, because the businessmen who owned them were Franco supporters. But there was not going to be money to restore the great symbolic works of Catalanist architecture, like the Palau de la Música Catalana, because these, like the best of the city’s culture, were opposed to the very spirit of Madrid centralism, of rule from outside Barcelona itself.
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    B ARCELONA WAS SHAPED, AND ITS DESTINY DETERMINED, by the fact that it began as a port and has been one ever since. Exactly when this birth occurred cannot now be fixed. At one point, there was a thin speckle of Bronze Age settlement by the sea there, extending up the seaward flank of what is now Montjuïc, the mountain which rears up to your right as you look out to sea from the waterfront. The people who inhabited it were known as the Laietani; they were, as far as anyone knows, indigenous; they were one of the various branches the Celtic tribesmen who, in prehistoric times, had come down across the Pyrenees to the coastal plains of what is now Catalunya and interbred with the resident Iberians, themselves the product and residue of earlier invasions from North Africa. Practically nothing is known about the Laietani. They did not have a written language (again, as far as anyone knows), which suggests that they did not trade except among themselves. One of the principal streets of modern Barcelona is known as the Via Laietana, and was so christened when an urban renewal scheme demanded a straight cut from hillside to waterfront; but there isn’t a smidgen of evidence that its track, when pushed through in 1908, had anything to do with the elusive Laietani, and little trace of them—no artifacts, let alone buildings—was found in the excavations. A small fossil of their presence may have been (not certainly, only possibly) the name Barcino, which supposedly meant “welcoming port.” Current fashions in history tend to favor the underdog, but even allowing for that the Laietani would seem to have achieved little, made less, and vanished almost without a trace under the heel of the Romans, who colonized this part of the Spanish coast as a base from which to run their war against the Carthaginians in 210 B.C. Even so, the future Barcelona did not become a significant colony—or not right away. That honor belonged to Tarraco (the future Tarragona), conquered in 210 B.C. by the ferocious young general Scipio Africanus Major, who marched south the next year and utterly destroyed the Punic base of Carthago Nova. Tarraco was rich. So was Carthago Nova, whose silver mines alone brought in twenty-five thousand drachmas a day. These were colonial possessions worth having. Not so the future Barcelona, which produced little but fish, and a once much esteemed breed of local oyster—long since, alas, rendered extinct by the industrial pollution of the harbor water.
    But when the Romans conquered a place, they took it over completely and re-formed it in their image. So it was with the little settlement that straggled up the slope of Montjuïc—a name, incidentally, that may (but again, not certainly) derive from Mons Iovis, the “hill of Jupiter.” The problem with Montjuïc was its lack of water. But two streams ran down from the plain to the beach, and it made sense to relocate the town (if it were to grow) between them, on a small, and today barely perceptible, eminence named Mont Taber. These framed the new city, which was hardly more than a village. It covered about thirty acres and was shaped liked a fat boot heel. Roughly at its center was the forum, which lies beneath what is still the administrative core of Barcelona—the Plaça Sant Jaume, between the Ajuntament, the seat of city government, and the Palau de la Generalitat, which houses the state government of Catalunya. In essence it was a Roman military