Greetings from Madrid, Reader, Galavanting around Spain for the past few weeks has been quite an adventure. And, as one would hope, I’ve learned to speak a little Spanish. Okay, very little. As in, just enough to be a polite American tourist who obviously doesn’t speak Spanish. ¡Hola! ¿Vegetariano? La cuenta, por favor. Gracias. Adiós. See? ¡Sí! But the most significant word I learned is tranqui. It’s short for tranquilo, which means calm or peaceful, like the English word “tranquil.” Tranqui...

Greetings from Montserrat, Reader, Imagine what the Temple of Apollo at Delphi would have looked like if it had been designed by Dr. Seuss. That’s a fair description of Parc Güell, a festive 42-acre garden complex draped across the southern slope of Mount Carmel on the northern edge of Barcelona. Designed by Antoni Gaudí, whose Modernist architectural imprint is practically synonymous with the capital of Catalonia, Parc Güell’s undulating architectural forms are rich in symbolism, its native...

Greetings from Tarragona, Reader, I’m sitting a stone’s throw or two from the Mediterranean Sea after spending most of my first week in Spain doing a museum-a-thon in Madrid. If you like art, you’ll love Madrid. I’m not usually a big Picasso fan, but his Harlequin with a Mirror has a wonderfully trippy quality that gets lost in reproduction and Guernica up close is as epic as they say it is. Spending time in front of Bosch’s famous triptych, TheGarden of Earthly Delights, was another...