La memoria de las piedras

The Canción a las ruinas de Itálica is the best-known expression of the sorrow with which scholars and lovers of antiquities watched the rapid disappearance of the remaining Roman monuments, victims of the neglect and ignorance of those who saw in them no more than a convenient quarry. Impotent to halt that ruin, they tried to save what they could, aware that in “the memory of the stones” there were answers to many questions that concerned them: the real geography of ancient Spain, the antiquity of its cities and lineages, the origin of its language and its institutions, the history of its martyrs and the details of the first apostolic preaching…