A map to explore the Madrid that Ava Gardner lived
From the moments to regain strength in the Commercial Cafe Until the nights that she drank in boy, going by the Loewe boutique on Gran Vía, the sweet gatherings in The Majorcan or the consommé in the Lhardy. The new illustrated cultural map of the City Council leads us to discover what was Ava's Madrid. By Ava Gardner, of course.
With the management of color and the way of working the profiles to which she has us accustomed the illustrator Jorge Arevalo and based on the novel Ava at night by Manuel Vicent (Editorial Alfaguara), this map takes us through what remains of a Madrid, the one from the 60s of the last century, that Ava Gardner lived and squeezed until in 1967 she left for London.
Before she caught the plane that would take her away from Madrid, Ava enjoyed the night on the town without having to look for the party because the party itself was her. The party, the real one, the one that no one wanted to miss and where everyone wanted to say they had been, was the one that started when she entered in Chicote, in the Corral de la Morería or in Florida Park.
It is for those places where Ava lived above good and evil in a slightly decaffeinated and miserable Madrid that this map takes us it has a lot of the night, but also something of the day. What the trail of a time when it was possible to avoid moral impositions by using the right words; the presidential suite 716 of the Castellana Hilton, where she lived as soon as she arrived in Madrid and which is now the Intercontinental Hotel; either San Gines. Although, well, we are not very clear if what Ava was asking for was to end the night or start the day.
The map can be downloaded from the official tourism page of the Madrid City Council.