In 1944, an undersecretary of Francoist Spain’s Ministry of Labour visited the city of Gijón to attend the funerals of a group of miners killed in a mine collapse. After the solemn rites took place, Turiño Carlos Pinilla met with a group of locals filled with concern for the offspring of the dead workers. All they asked of the bureaucrat was an orphanage; what they ended up with ten years later was a magnificent palace of charity, almost a city unto itself and the largest building in Spain: the Universidad Laboral de Gijón.

An example of Catholic social teaching (which upholds the essential dignity of work and the working man), the “labor university” was founded as a secondary-level institution to teach vocational and technical skills to the children of Spain’s working class. At over 2,900,000 sq. ft. of space, it is more than double the size of the great Royal Monastery and Palace of El Escorial built by Phillip II in the sixteenth century, and was accompanied by over 380 acres of farmland.

The goal was to accommodate 1,000 students (eventually doubling) from the age of 12 to 16, with residences, school facilities, industrial workshops, working farmland, athletic facilities, and sporting fields. The educational aspect and leadership of the Laboral was entrusted to the Jesuits, while the Poor Clares also had a convent on the premises, performing various household tasks and caring for the girls as their particular charism.

Construction began in 1946, while much of the rest of Europe was recovering from the horrors of the Second World War. Francisco Franco, meanwhile, had vowed at the end of Spain’s tragic Civil War (1936-1939) to never again take up his sword unless Spain herself was attacked, and the country was spared the further horrors of the global conflict.

The Universidad Laboral de Gijón was the first of the handful of “labor universities” founded during Franco’s rule, and some of the brightest minds in Spain were involved in its creation. The gardens, created to train students in landscaping, were designed by Javier de Winthuyssen, the National Inspector of Parks and Artistic Gardens while the farms where students would learn the skills of agriculture were orchestrated by Gabino Figar, Spain’s leading agronomist. The building itself featured sculpture by Manuel Alvarez Laviada and Florentino Trapero, mosaics by Santiago Padrós, and murals by the painter Joaquin Valverde.

The architect, however was Luis Moya Blanco. Born in Madrid in 1904, Moya came from an architectural family. His father (and namesake), Luis Moya Idígoras, was the most prominent road engineer in Spain while his uncle was the head of the School of Architecture in Madrid. Before the Universidad Laboral, Moya was best known for his work on the Museo de America, the museum exhibiting Spain’s artistic and archaeological treasures from the New World, situated on the Avenue of the Catholic Monarchs in Madrid.

Part of the plan of the Universidad Laboral was to act as a miniature ideal city, and the building asserts its independence by facing away from the city of Gijón. Passing through the massive entrance gate, the visitor first encounters the Corinthian Court, a massive atrium lined with ten Corinthian columns 34 ft. tall. Originally open to the heavens, the top of the courtyard was recently given a glass roof.

Through the Corinthian Court, one proceeds into the great central courtyard of the Laboral and is immediately drawn to the church at the center, with the 385-ft. tower behind it, and flanked by the theatre (on the right) and the entrance to the school wing (on the left).

Reflecting the concept of the ideal city, the Church is at the very center and heart of the Laboral. The church is elliptical in shape, but retains the traditional linear liturgical arrangement inside, like all the churches designed by Moya. In the main portal of the Church, above the lintel over the entrance, is a statue of Our Lady of Covadonga, patroness of the Asturias.

The main portal is itself flanked by four columns, two on either side, which are topped by statues of saints: St. Joseph, St. Ignatius, St. Peter, and St. Paul. Atop the portal is St. James the Apostle on horseback, with two angels worshipping a Cross. Originally, this was a specially crafted version of the Cruz de la Victoria, a particular symbol of the Asturias which appears on the principality’s flag, but this precious work of art has since been removed and replaced with a more simple metal version. Circling the church are statues of St. John of the Cross, St. John Bosco, St. Vincent Ferrer, St. Melchor de Quiros, St. Clare, St. Peter of Alcantara, St. Laurence, St. Isidore of Seville, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Dominic Guzman, St. Francis, St. Joseph Calasanctius, St. Eulalia, King St. Ferdinand III of Castile, St. Isidore the Laborer, and St. Toribio de Liébana.

The interior of the church features inlaid marble floors and specially-constructed pews (one of the necessary drawbacks of elliptical churches) made of embero wood imported from Spanish (now Equatorial) Guinea.

The original high altar was removed during the 1970s, but strangely it seems the baldacchino was never completed.

A thin altar rail divided the sanctuary from the nave.

The workshops where students were taught industrial skills.

Classrooms all had a crucifix and a picture of Spain’s caudillo.

Franco was present at the official opening of the Universidad Laboral in 1955.

Major construction finished a year later, though one portion of the complex (above left) remains unfinished.

The theatre of the Laboral was the first air-conditioned theatre in all of Europe.

Above the façade of the theatre rests a sculpture of the Spanish coat of arms under Franco. The yoke and arrows (el yugo y las flechas) were the symbols of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs who united Spain as one kingdom. These symbols were included in the coat of arms of Spain from 1492 to 1504 and then from 1938 to 1981. The Falange, the official (yet still somewhat marginalized) political party of the Franco regime, used a stylized yoke-and-arrows as their official emblem.

The Poor Clares doing the laundry in the lower part of their convent. The circular convent (below) was located towards the rear of the Laboral, and featured an open loggia looking out over the nuns’ garden.

Teachers at the café bar.

The Universidad Laboral’s cows pose to have their picture taken.

Unfortunately, with the death of Franco and the subsequent transformation of the Spanish state, all the Universidad Laborals began to suffer from neglect. The Jesuits handed over control of the Gijón school to the faculty in 1978. Originally funded by the trade unions, they became part of the state-run National Institute for Integrated Education in the 1980s. Shortly afterwards, the Poor Clares were kicked out of their convent. As Luis Moya’s great palace of learning deteriorated, enrollment fell and the Universidad Laboral de Gijón moved to a separate, much smaller campus where it continues today as an “institute of secondary education”.

In 2001, the regional government of the Asturias took charge of the building and its massive grounds. The greater part of the school’s farms were turned into a public golf course. The Laboral itself has been reinvented as a “City of Culture”, its massive complex housing a variety of enterprises. The classrooms now house a campus of the University of Oviedo, where students of business, tourism, and public administration are now taught, as well as the Higher School of Performing Arts. Technological innovations are explored at the Science Park Technology Gijón, while the German multinational ThyssenKrupp has its Spanish headquarters and research & development labs in the Laboral. A hospital is located in the building, and a five-star hotel is due to open in April 2009.

The convent from which the Poor Clares were expelled has been turned into a television studio for RTPA, the regional broadcaster for the Principality of the Asturias.

At least partly in keeping with the original idea, a vocational training center remains at the Laboral’s industrial workshop, with 900 students enrolled.

Deconsecrated, the church that once housed Christ at the center of the Universidad Laboral now serves primarily as a performance venue.

While the departure from its original purpose is to be lamented, at least Moya’s beautiful structure is now being maintained and appreciated after years of neglect. During the interwar period, architects plumbed the depths of modernism with interesting results, but after the war they abandoned the safety of the surface and were submerged into those depths. The results were almost entirely catastrophic. Luis Moya, and a number of the other Spanish architects favored under the Franco regime, present a convincing counterargument.

The Universidad Laboral presents us with an architecture that is a continuation of history, rather than a rejection of history. Its components exhibit a classical symmetry but, like the human body itself, are arranged in a somewhat asymmetrical but nonetheless orderly form. It is the largest building in Spain but is broken up into smaller portions to prevent it from overburdening the inhabitants. It exhibits a natural hierarchy of forms, with the Church at its very heart. The Laboral is proof that there is another way of doing things: that one can be at once modern and traditional. That is a lesson that certainly needs to be understood by architects, but surely also by the rest of society as well.

The old straight-armed Roman salute was back in fashion last month as the crowds swamped Michaelangelo’s Campidoglio in Rome to welcome Gianni Alemanno, the newly-elected right-wing mayor of the Eternal City. The fifty-year-old native of Bari on Italy’s southern Adriatic coast easily defeated leftist Francesco Rutelli, who previously served as Mayor of Rome from 1993 to 2001.

Gianni Alemanno

Alemanno was frequently attacked by the Left for his alleged fascism as a prominent member of Italy’s Alleanza Nazionale, formerly the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement (MSI). The MSI was abolished in 1995 by its leader Gianfranco Fini, who refounded the party as the “National Alliance” seeking to move it closer to the mainstream of Italian politics. Mr. Alemanno had joined the MSI at a young age and became National Secretary of its youth wing in 1988. With the 1995 changeover, he founded the “Social Right” faction of the AN (along with Francesco Storace), which promotes social conservatism within the broadly-based Allianza.

Part of the mayor’s supposedly murky past includes his arrest in 1981 for a brawl in which a left-wing student was beaten with baseball bats. A year later he was arrested for throwing a molotov cocktail at the Soviet embassy, while in 1989 he was arrested for attempting to block to motorcade of President George Bush Snr. In each of the three incidents, Mr. Alemanno was acquitted.

Elected to the lower house of the Italian parliament in 1994, Mr. Alemanno served as Minister of Agriculture from 2001 to 2006 in the second and third Berlusconi cabinets. He was defeated in the 2006 race for Mayor of Rome by Walter Veltroni — now leader of the leftist Partito Democratico — but in the April vote he managed to defeat the former socialist leader Rutelli.

Alemanno’s critics have cited the cries of “Duce! Duce!” that greeted the new mayor as he took possession of the municipal offices on the Capitoline hill as evidence of a fascist undercurrent.

“People calling me ‘Duce’ makes me laugh,” Mr. Alemanno told the Sunday Times of London in his first interview with a foreign newspaper. “I’m not at all fascist and I think that today the word belongs to the history books. I’ve grown to hate all forms of totalitarianism, whether of the left or of the right.”

“I’ve never described myself as fascist,” he continued, “even when I was young, but in the 1970s and 1980s we on the right believed fascism was substantially positive. Now we realise it was totalitarian and generally negative, it has to be condemned.”

“It would be impossible for a fascist to be elected mayor of Rome,” the new mayor concluded. “Rome is a city that has solid democratic roots and that respects everyone. The Romans are not mad and neither am I.”

Mr. Alemanno has already proved keen on maintaining good relations with the Eternal City’s Jewish population. He sent a telegram to the Chief Rabbi of Rome upon assuming the municipal leadership, and flew the Israeli flag from the Campidoglio in celebration of the State of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary.

He also sent a telegram to Pope Benedict XVI, promising his “complete collaboration with the catholic community for the good of all Roman citizens”.

One of Mr. Alemanno’s more culturally significant campaign promises is to remove the modernist museum designed by the American architect Richard Meier which surrounds the first-century Roman monument, the Ara Pacis. Even the arch-enthusiast of celebrity “starchitects”, Nicolai Ouroussoff of the New York Times labelled the building a “flop” and a “major disappointment”.

“There’s a problem of compatibility,” Mr. Alemanno told the media. “The structure is surrounded by baroque buildings and, in that part of the city, any intervention must be in the same style”.

The left-wing literary critic Alfonso Berardinelli, meanwhile, has sounded a note of caution for Rome’s jubliant rightists. In an interview with Il Foglio, Prof. Berardinelli said:

“More than a victory of the Right, this was a defeat for the Left, which is unable to understand the physical nature of the city’s problems. Although I consider myself on the Left, I didn’t vote; I couldn’t have voted for Alemanno, but then neither could I vote for Rutelli. But here in Rome the electorate didn’t believe that Rutelli would sort out the city’s problems, whereas they were prepared to give Alemanno the benefit of the doubt.”

With regard to the allegations of fascism, Prof. Berardinelli said “Fascism is now a political anachronism and anyone who says they fear its return is nuts”. The Alleanza Nazionale, the Professor explained, “wants to sever all links” with its fascist past.

“Society wants a balance of stability and of freedom, and rightly or wrongly, this time round it was the message of the center-right in Rome that came over as sounding more authentic,” the Professor continued. “This is the advantage of a man who is not instantly likeable, and who is somewhat proud like Alemanno; they have a sense of who they are which makes them politically credible.”

Writing at the conservative, eurosceptic Brussels Journal, the English journalist and academic John Laughland hailed the latest right-wing victory in Italy and dismissed the British commentariat’s glib contempt for the state of affairs in the peninsula.

“Italian politics is often dismissed (in Britain at least) as nothing but a combination of opera buffa and artful corruption,” Mr. Laughland writes. “It is true that the country’s political life seems chaotic when viewed from outside; but that is true of Italian life in general, where the appearance of chaos in fact masks the reality of extremely professional organisation. Anyone who has taken a train or a bus in Italy will know this to be true (the contrast with Britain, for instance, is very unfavourable to the British). The Italians are masterful businessmen and very hard-working professionals, who continue to produce some of the world’s best products, from cars and kitchens to fashion and food.”

Speaking of Mr. Alemanno’s promise to destroy Richard Meier’s abomination at the Ara Pacis, Mr. Laughland had the last word: “If Alemanno does only one thing during his term in office, if he achieves this single act of cultural restoration or counter-revolution, then the entire election will have been well worth it.”

From 1887, the Café Central (or Centrál Kávéház, in Magyar) has been a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, professionals, and others located on Budapest’s Károlyi Mihály street. One of its most famous patrons was the novelist and dramatist Ferenc Molnár (born Ferenc Neumann and often anglicized as Franz Molnar), whose 1906 book The Paul Street Boys is perhaps the most widely-read Hungarian novel. His 1909 play “Liliom” was later adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein into the musical “Carousel”. Both his plays “The Guardsman” and “The Swan” were later made into films (the latter being Grace Kelly’s final appearance on the silver screen), while “The Play at the Castle” was adapted by P.G. Wodehouse into “The Play’s the Thing” and by Tom Stoppard into “Rough Crossing”.

During the bloody revolt of the socialist Béla Kun in 1919, thugs roamed the streets of Budapest unchallenged, and for safety’s sake many refused to go out at night unless in a suitably large group of people. Molnár for the most part chose to stay at home, but nonetheless encouraged his friends to visit him. One night, a few friends arrived at his house accompanied by a very large man as a security precaution. Molnár gave him a worrying look for much of the evening and when it came time for his friends to depart, Molnár shooks hands with the giant man, asking him “Aren’t you afraid to go home by yourself? Aren’t you terribly afraid that you’ll attack somebody?”

On another occasion, a friend arrived at Molnár’s just as the playwright was readying for bed. He observed Molnár taking off his slippers and placing them by his bed, the one facing the other, toe-to-toe. The visitor inquired the meaning of this ritual. “You see,” Molnár replied, “if you put them side by side, both staring straight ahead, they look like a married couple who have just had words. It depresses me. But see how friendly they look nose to nose! They cheer me up and I sleep better.”

After Kun had been overthrown and peace was restored to Budapest, Molnár was holding court at the Centrál as per usual when his American agent came to Budapest, desperate to bring Molnár to New York (where his play “Liliom” was proving a tremendous success). Molnár, who was not a huge fan of travel, would not budge, claiming that the idea of the journey alone filled him with dread. His agent tried to assure Molnár that he would travel first-class in the highest comfort: first across Europe on the Orient Express, then to America on a luxury passenger ship. Molnár remonstrated, “But what about the journey from this café to the railway station?”

Feuds and spats are often rife in the literary world, and Molnár’s life was no exception. He used to say of his rival, the unusually thin journalist Felecki, that “when Felecki was born, the midwife kept the umbilical cord and threw away the baby”. Late rising is another frequent characteristic of the literary life, and true to form Molnár rarely ever rose before noon. There was one instance, however, when circumstances induced him to arise not only before noon but indeed even earlier in the morning. Molnár had been summoned to appear as a witness in a lawsuit in Budapest and was ordered to present himself at the court at 9:00 am. Chiefly thanks to the workings of his servants, he duly rose and dressed and was pressed out of the house by a half-hour before the appointed time. Astounded by the masses of citizens on their way to work, the first rush hour he had ever witnessed, Molnár exclaimed “Good heavens! Are all these people witnesses in this damned case?”

Ferenc Molnar

Later in the 1920s, Molnár left Budapest for the old imperial capital, Vienna, where he lived comfortably in a hotel. Hearing of the flourishing dramatist, a significant number of related Molnárs came to visit, no doubt in the hopes of enjoying some of the fruits of their kinsman’s success. Suspecting they would not be received with open arms, they were pleasantly surprised when Ferenc welcomed them with great kindness and affection, much more so than they had expected. He even demanded that a group photograph be taken to commemorate the visit. When the print of the photograph was prepared, Molnár handed it to his doorman, instructing “whenever you see any of the persons in the picture trying to get into the hotel, don’t let them in!”

One evening in Vienna, Molnár was invited to the house of a prominent politician for a party at which the acclaimed Austrian tenor Richard Tauber was singing. The playwright was enjoying the evening immensely until, with a cigar in one hand, he reached the other around the waist of the agreeable-looking hostess. It was then that her husband crossed the room determinedly and in a low voice spoke: “Herr Molnár, may I see you in private?” With increasing woe, Molnár stepped into the neighboring room with the host. “Herr Molnár,” he gravely said, “I must ask you not to smoke while Herr Tauber is singing; it is bad for his throat”.

The changing political situation meant it became impossible for Molnár (who was of Jewish extraction) to remain in Vienna nor to return to Budapest. He fled to New York, as did so many European intellectuals of the day. One day a group of assembled exiled Hungarians were discussing the first phrases they learned in English as they became more acclimatized to Manhattan living. After the predictable “Hellos”, “Goodbyes”, and “Good mornings” were mentioned, Molnár finally interjected “The first sentence I learned was ‘Separate checks, please!’”

While fascism forced him into exile, the rise of communism prevented Molnár from returning home to Budapest, and he died in New York in 1952. In 1949, when the socialist regime nationalised all private enterprise, the old Café Central was shut and the site became a cafeteria for subway workers, later becoming an amusement arcade. More recently, it was purchased by local entrepreneur Imre Somody and restored. Providentially, this old haunt of Ferenc Molnár (not to mention numerous other Hungarian intellectuals) is now returned to its former glory as one of the most prominent coffee houses in the Pearl of the Danube.

It is sometimes said that a thin pope follows a fat one, and with a mere three articles, this edition of Norumbega is certainly thinner than the seven articles of the previous fortnight. Nonetheless, we are certain that our readers appreciate that the amateur nature of this feuilleton means it must ebb and flow with the tide of our quotidian existence, and that sometimes we lamentably cannot devote as much time as we would like to our humble little effort. But rest assured, there is much of interest in line for upcoming Norumbegas, provided we have the patience and fortitude to persevere.