Secret corners of Madrid: the Pompeyana Tavern

When the ruins of the famous Roman city of Pompeii were discovered, tragically buried by the unexpected volcanic activity of Vesuvius, archaeologists and Western society of the time saw their rigid moral foundations reeling dangerously, when they first penetrated one of their badly damaged buildings, a town that would leave them speechless and bewildered by the content of their wall paintings.

Denominated as the Villa of the Mysteries, the astonished spectators of that world lost among tons of lava and ash, felt their morality more damaged by the apparently pornographic content of those reproductions, than their sensitivity hurt by the contemplation of the numerous corpses, eternally converted in statues in the same position where death surprised them.

Kabbalahs soon began to be made about the real activities that were carried out in such a place and to this day, they still have not agreed on whether that peculiar site was a lupanar or if, on the contrary, it constituted a kind of temple , whose initiations included, perhaps to a degree of relative importance, unknown fertility cults, to which the peoples and cultures of Antiquity were so fond.

It could also be the case that the Villa of the Pompeian Mysteries was a private residence, such as the Villa de Materno, located in the Toledo town of Carranque, very close to Madrid, where the refinement, in addition to showing a overlapping eroticism, also showed that taste for beauty and comfort, which has always characterized the wealthy classes of all cultures.

Madrid has always been a charismatic city, where its inhabitants, either to hide those miseries that so wisely knew to portray in their Whims, that genius of the painting that was Francisco de Goya or because his spirit was influenced by that antidote against uncertainty and the despair, which is the Fiesta, has always known how to enjoy its traditions, applying to itself that Latin maxim that simply says Carpe Diem: Live or enjoy the moment.

It is not difficult, then, to observe, within that eminently vitalist attitude, traditional places, which for over a hundred years of existence, have crossed that metaphorical red line, which separates an oppressive and Victorian morality - Doña Cuaresma, from the Carnivals - of an unbridled carnality, or if you prefer, the cheerful cult of Doña Cuaresma's counterpart, represented by Don Carnal, circumstance, which after all, is nothing but the liberation of some instincts that compensate for the preceding anguish between these two states primordial of existence, which are life and death.

Or broadening the question a little more: that uncertainty with which the Madrid faces the terrible, distressing mystery that represents what may or may not be after death.

Such premises or perhaps the influence of certain premises, such as that of the poet Antonio Machado, when he said that "the envy of virtue made Cain criminal," may make sense of places like this Pompeyana Tavern, where on a smaller scale but with the same picaresque, the scandalous wall paintings of the famous Villa de los Misterios of the ill-fated Pompeian city are reproduced, while the public tastes the traditional Madrid cuisine, which, they may believe, is scandalously ... delicious.

NOTICE: Both the text and the accompanying photographs are my exclusive intellectual property.

[Alvarez Gato Street, number 5]

txatxy05/04/2019