Max Milano's Blog, page 2

San Francisco Street Photography

By Max Milano

Street photography is an art form that conjures images of Henri Cartier-Bresson's iconic black-and-white photographs captured with his trusted Leica. It's an art form that captures the beauty of the everyday life surrounding us. 

...

The End Of An Era

They call it middle age, as if a second half is guaranteed. I'd chosen to ignore my own impending appointment with this existential milestone until a message on my Samsung brought reality crashing down.

Harry was dead.

We'd gone to high school together in the 1980s and caroused in the early 1990s as grunge kids with Nirvana T-shirts and Doc Martens boots.

"Harry died of a heart attack," my friend Pat is talking from the other end of a video call, "he was only 53."

Pat's face is ashen. He looks sha...

A Night At The Roxy, Prague, September 10 2001

This is an extract from Max Milano’s upcoming novel “A Common Terrorist”.

All the rich kids had gone to Europe for their semester abroad, but Alex had to work that summer. Hannah went to Prague to study opera or something, while Alex served tables at Sarabeth’s on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side while skimping and saving for a shoulder season ticket to Prague on Lufthansa and a couch surfing deal. That’s how he found himself confined to a two-bedroom apartment in a tower block o...

A Night At The Roxy, Prague, November 1993

In the shadowy depths of Prague's history lies the Kino Roxy, a place with a past as dark and complex as the city itself. Once owned by the Jewish community, this cinema became a hub of culture and entertainment when it was opened in the 1920s.

But the Second World War brought a sinister change, as the Germans used the Roxy as a staging ground for transporting Jews to concentration camps. The cinema echoed the cries of those destined for an unknown fate.

In the 1950s, the FAMU film school took ov...

The Ice Storm

Beat Poetry Or Shakespearean Iambic Pentameter? Why Not Both? We Present To You, The Ice Storm by Max Milano. Performed Live and Filmed In A Real Ice Storm In Truckee, California.

The Ice Storm

A Beat Poem by Max Milano

You Can't Die In An Avalanche

If You're Poor

She Said

But We Won't Die

We Won't Die Tonight

In The Snow

Or In A Flood

We Won't Die

Tonight

I Believe It

She Said

Lost Your Mojo

Where Have You Gone?

We've Driven In Snow

Up Volcanoes

And If A Mudslide Takes Us Out

So Be It

What Can You Do?

I Will D...

Mexico City Noir

We're climbing up high and at a fast speed. Our rented Nissan Kicks is living up to Avis' motto and is, indeed, 'trying harder.' I've had 'pedal to the metal' ever since leaving the last working-class colonias that cling to the dusty foothills on the edge of Mexico City's polluted thin air, and now we're high up in the pine-forested slope of a 17000-foot mountain. 

The colonias we just passed are high up, some best accessible via cable cars, but not the ones that run on street tracks but the ones...

Mexico City Blues

Teotihuacán. We park as close to the looming black Pyramid of the Sun as the dirt parking lot allows. We've just broken through a crowd of touts wearing official-looking high-visibility vests and into the calm of the parking lot at the base of the black pyramid that rises above the dry land like a determined hill. It's eight in the morning, and the sun has just risen above the cuboidal flat top of the pyramid. Sunrays spill down the pyramid's steps like heads lopped off by the obsidian-encru...

Los Angeles. A Beat Poem By Max Milano

Charlie don't surf

But he thinks he should

In Pismo Beach

He won't stop

Till he does damage

Cause Charlie don't surf

But he thinks he should

In Rincon he shows up

Between hurricanes

And Iguanas

Charlie Don't surf

But he thinks he should

In Miami Beach

Between Cubano sandwiches

And flan

Just because he can

And Dudamel

Is the dude

At the Hollywood Bowl

With Classic Salsa

And Oscar D'Leon

Because George Michael

Beat His Meat

To Mexicans across from

The Beverly Hills Hotel

And Wild Palms

Above Trumpists and Ukrainians

S...

The Last New Year's Eve Party In Paris

This is the first chapter of Max Milano’s latest novel Hollywood Expats, available on Amazon. Chapter 1   The Last New Year's Eve Party in Paris  December 31, 2015

It's ten to midnight in Paris. 2015 is due to expire at the top of the hour, and only the hardened and foolish are out hitting the bars of the Bastille district.

My fiancée, Monica, and I had earlier in the evening left the foolish at a packed Australian pub on Rue de la Roquette, opting instead for a seedy joint called "Objectif Lune" located just a few doors down. The bar's name is the only Tintin reference to be found inside because both the decor and the clientele seem to be doing their best to answer a casting call for a 1980s Luc Besson movie: Leather jackets, wild punk hairdos, graffiti on the walls, and shabby multiethnic chic all around.

We order two shots of clear Pastis with Belgian beer chasers. You can always get Belgian beer in Paris, even in the grittier bars of Rue de la Roquette (a narrow street with rows of bars, sushi joints, and cafés that runs from Place de La Bastille to Boulevard Voltaire, and eventually up to the main gates of Père Lachaise cemetery).

Monica seems to have Père Lachaise on her mind tonight. She keeps talking about a poem she's writing about Père Lachaise's many illustrious guests, like Jim Morrison and Chopin, between her sips of Belgian Saison. But Monica's not a writer; she's an actress. You've probably seen something she's in—a little something called The Show. A sleeper hit that's become the hottest streaming show on the planet.

"Jim Morrison died of an overdose in an apartment building within walking distance of here, you know," Monica says loudly and drunkenly, trying to be heard above the 80s French punk rock blaring from the speakers. I recognize the song. It's from a band called Indochine. The song's called "3e Sexe."

Some punk girls in fishnets and leather at the back of the bar are singing along, repeating the chorus like a drunken lullaby.

"Des garçons au féminin...Des filles au masculin!"

We're hanging by the bar (as we do). The bartender serves himself a shot and raises a glass—the clock chimes midnight. Paris's annus horribilis has just come to an end. An Irish couple and a group of Parisian Algerian girls at the bar hug us and then each other. It's way too soon to celebrate anything, but all of us, in a way, probably feel that the reason we're out tonight is to not give up on our freedom to celebrate. The foolish and the hardened together for one brief moment. We are like the cockroaches that are supposed to survive a nuclear blast, only that nuclear blast-like events are now becoming practically routine. Only six weeks ago, a group of terrorists massacred ninety people just like us at the Bataclan Theater, and about forty more in cafés not far from where we now raise a glass to celebrate our last New Year's Eve party in Paris.

It's after midnight. We walk out into the now busy Rue de la Roquette. We've stepped into a river of brave and foolish souls that must have suddenly decided to leave the apparent safety of their own bedrooms and take the Metro to the 11th arrondissement and venture down its boulevards as a final act of defiance. After all, the Metro is free for the night, as the Algerian girls told us earlier at the bar. 

We're walking against the foot traffic, getting further away from Place de La Bastille until we reach a corner café called La Fée Verte. It definitely feels like a green fairy sort of night, unseasonably warm for January and still young (the night, not us particularly).

Despite the crowds outside, the bar at La Fée Verte is almost empty. The staff is wearing colorful clown wigs in a last-ditch effort to stir a sense of cheerfulness to the proceedings, but they aren't fooling anyone. However, their green liquid on offer is just the thing we need to help ease our strange and unwarranted feeling of survivor's guilt.

The young woman behind the bar pulls out a pair of absinthe glasses and spoons as we settle in our stools. We know her from previous visits, but she's trying her best to pretend not to know us and failing miserably at it. She's originally from Morocco and had told us on previous visits that she'd learned English in our hometown of Los Angeles, so we'd bonded over that. 

Monica smirks dryly and sits on the stool next to mine to watch the ritual. The Morrocan girl grabs a bottle from the counter, and coyly smiles back. She pours the green spirit into the absinthe glasses. She then grabs two flat silver absinthe spoons with stylized holes in them and places them atop our glasses. She follows this up with a pair of sugar cubes, one for each spoon. She sets our glasses and spoons under a Belle Époque water fountain with tiny copper taps. I stare at the Morrocan girl as she adjusts the taps like a nurse fixing a patient's drip, until the drops begin to land on the sugar cubes at a perfect rate. Her skin is creamy olive oil and butterscotch brown, and she's wearing a breezy summer dress that highlights her long, tall frame and black wavy hair. In fascination, we watch how the green absinthe slowly turns milky white, and the sugar cubes melt into nothingness.

We sit in silence and sip our drinks. The milky white liquid tastes of aniseed and wormwood, but it helps lift the general doom and gloom around us, even if just for a moment.

"I think I need to go to the Bataclan."

Monica's words hang in the air like the last milky droplets of absinthe in her glass.

"When? Tonight?" I ask incredulously.

"I just want to pay my respects," she says. "I'm done pretending that it didn't happen and that we didn't lose any friends…"

I know her too well to respond with a retort. It wasn't “friends.” Just a friend. Moreover, the friend in question was an ex from college that she hadn't seen in ten years, but that was beside the point. The whole thing would have hit home anyway. We'd begun to think of the area around Bastille and the Voltaire Metro station as our little piece of Parisian home. Just far enough from the tourist trap cafés of the Trocadéro and Champs-Elysées, but not quite far away enough to be in the outer banlieues, where the beauty of Belle Époque Paris dissolves into a mid-twentieth century dystopian nightmare of concrete flats.

A dark woman wearing a white Spanish shawl draped over her shoulders walks into the bar with her arms full of red flowers. Monica motions to her and whispers some words in French. Euros are exchanged for what looks like at least a dozen roses individually wrapped in cellophane. Monica's French is good; she could at least pass for French Canadian on account of her Montreal-accented French. She'd swapped sunny Southern California for the rolling vineyards around Lyon as an exchange student during her last year at UCLA, followed by two years in Montreal working in movie production. That's where she met Jean-Jacques, the dead Frenchman.

Monica drains her last drops of absinthe and rushes outside, flowers in hand. I ask for the bill, and the Morrocan girl hands it to me in a small silver tray that also has a little cupcake wrapped in cellophane. "Happy New Year," she whispers in her heavily-accented English. I don't have to ask her what flavor the cupcake is. I know that its main ingredient is hash. 

"Merci," I reply, and she gives me a fiery look. 

"Go to her," she says impatiently. I blow her a kiss and turn around to follow Monica. 

Rue de la Roquette is completely packed with revelers as if the veil of sadness that descended over the city for the last six weeks has been allowed to be lifted, even if just for one night.

Monica is walking a tad unsteadily in her black riding boots. She looks like the thinking person's indie-rock girl wet dream in her 1950s cat-eye specs, vintage motorcycle leather jacket, and knee-high black riding boots over tight blue jeans. Her snow-white skin and jet-black hair make her look like she'd just stepped out of central casting for a 1950s mod-girl moped gang movie (if there's such a genre).

I follow Monica along the closed and darkened stores of the Rue Popincourt, knowing better than to say anything at this point. I catch up with her and hold her hand as we continue along the narrow and dark street towards the bright lights of Boulevard Voltaire up ahead. Monica is balancing her dozen roses in one arm as if holding a baby. We've been living together for the last four years and are sort-of unofficially engaged on account of that, but something has always gotten in the way of setting up an official wedding date. Either our careers or her mother's illness or whatever else seems to always pop up to conspire against it. Me not actually officially asking her to marry me, and then us relocating from Los Angeles to Belfast to work on her hit TV show for the last two years certainly hasn't helped. The culture shock of Belfast, coupled with 18-hour workdays, has strained us and our relationship. This trip to our apartment in Paris over the New Year's break was supposed to be our way to reconnect with the city we loved and one another, but after the massacre six weeks ago, we're as broody as the rest of the city.

We enter Boulevard Voltaire. There's a small crowd surrounding the burnt-out and still smoldering shell of a police van. Parisian firemen in their shiny metal helmets are putting out the last of the flames as a police detective interviews the shocked neighbors. Typically a fire-bombed police van is treated as an everyday occurrence in Paris, particularly in the outlying suburbs of brutalist flats surrounding the city. But nerves are frayed this close to the Bataclan. One of the neighbors is crying. She's an old woman in a nightgown. A policewoman comforts her. It looks like the van exploded right under her balcony.

We pass the smoldering police van and the crying neighbors in silence. Nothing's shocking anymore; it's the end of the world, and everyone knows it. 

The Square du Bataclan is dark and silent. A small group of people mill about, looking at the mementos and homemade posters pinned to iron railings of an improvised memorial people have created. It's a heartbreaking scene, with flags from several countries and handwritten messages in several languages. Hundreds of photos of young people smiling for the camera in the months, days, or weeks before being cut down in the prime of their lives.

Monica kneels and places the flowers on the sidewalk next to a colorfully painted acoustic guitar onto which someone has scribbled, This machine kills terror in black felt-tip pen and, Love is all we need. Rock n' roll will never die.

I turn away from Square du Bataclan and face the venue. It looks like a building after a fire; dark, boarded up, and stitched up with police tape. A large white sheet covers the main entrance as if the venue itself had also died but was still lying on the sidewalk, waiting for the coroner's van.

"We always talked about coming to Paris and going to a punk rock show." 

Monica's voice is faint and hard to hear due to the two-tone wail of a Parisian firetruck barging up Boulevard Voltaire. Perhaps another police van is on fire somewhere. It feels as if the whole world is on fire.

"He was the only man I've ever loved," Monica continues. I realize she's not talking about me. "I mean, really, truly loved...because you never forget your first anyway."

I let her words hang in the air. Her exquisitely pale face is framed by strands of jet-black locks that pour out from under her wool beanie, and her gray eyes are damp with tears as they flicker in and out of sight in the dark corner where she's standing.

I know she wants to hurt me with such statements, so I try my best not to take the bait.

"Come on, let's go. You've done your part, paid your respects. Besides, it's the absinthe talking..."

"You'll never understand how I'm feeling right now. Come to think of it, you never understand how I feel most of the time," she snips, rejecting my hand with a swiping motion of her arm.

"Are we back on that trip now?"

"It's not a trip...sometimes I really feel like you're...I don't know…emotionally autistic."

"Emotionally autistic? Why? Because I'm not ready to fawn over some dead guy whose only claim to fame is that he...he deflowered my fiancée?"

"Oh, so you're using big words now? Deflowered? Really? Who uses that word anymore? Why don't you go full Jane Austen on me and call it 'taking my honor?'"

"I'm a writer, sorry if I know how to use certain words in the English language."

 "Writing for a sitcom on cable TV hardly counts as the great American novel."

"Calling The Show a sitcom is like calling Les Misérables light summer reading."

"Whatever. You're no Whit Stillman, no matter how much yuppie angst you force into that stupid TV show. Jean-Jacques was the man you'll never be...and while we're at it, why don't we just use the 'correct nomenclature.'" I hate it when Monica starts using air quotations, and I know I'm in trouble when she starts quoting The Big Lebowski. "He didn't just 'deflower me,'" Monica continues, "he FUCKED me, you hear? He fucked me a lot, and It was GOOD..."

I wait a beat, determined not to take the bait.

"Why are you doing this?"

"Do you have to ask?"

"I thought we had agreed not to bring it up tonight, to let this be our last New Year's Eve in Paris together..."

"Agreed to what? To forgive and move on and forget? Forget that while I was back in LA, dealing with my mother's death, you were back here fucking, yes, let's not get all Jane Austen about it, the word is 'fucking’ that slutty Moroccan waitress from La Fée Verte."

"You've lost your mind."

"Oh? So I've lost my mind? Did you ever consider my feelings? 'Oh, her English is sooo good' you kept saying the first time we went in there. Hope her blowjobs were as good as her syntax!"

"I knew it was a bad idea to go back there...I told you so. Your idea of a 'last New Year's Eve' in Paris together as a couple, pretending it's all hunky-dory, even though we both know it's over, is as bad as it gets."

"I just had to see her with my own eyes again. I wanted to see what kind of whore sleeps with an unavailable man while his fiancée is away because her mother has just died. I think you'll find her picture right next to the definition of 'monster bitch' in the dictionary."

"You know as well as I do that I never, quote, unquote, 'fucked her.' Never happened. You were back in LA; we were shooting in Belfast all month; I couldn't get away 'cause of all the rewrites... we'd been working 18-hour days. I finally got two days off and decided to come down to our place here, and I just couldn't stand being alone in our apartment. I was emotionally distraught about your mother too, you know. Then we'd had that long video call after you came back from scattering her ashes. I was feeling really drained. Contrary to popular belief, I have feelings too, you know. So I remembered La Fée Verte from last summer...When I went in there, sex was the last thing on my mind...I figured that a whole bottle of absinthe was the only cure for my depression. Who would have known that half a bottle later, a bunch of assholes would decide to shoot up the city?"

"Oh, so you happened to stumble upon the one bar in Paris where we both had commented that the waitress was hot? Of all the bars in Bastille, you walk into that one...and not only that, you just happen to invite her back to our apartment...yes 'our,' let's not forget that. Next time, if you're gonna pick up some bar floozy, take her to a sleazy hotel where she belongs, not to our home. Oh, I just remembered, there isn't going to be a 'next time' because I'm moving back to LA as soon as this season wraps. You can stay here and sleep with all the slutty bar whores that you want!"

"I never slept with anyone...I mean, we did sleep, but not together...Not in the way you're thinking. I was too drunk to get home. She listened to me at the bar. All I did was talk about you and that I wanted to be with you but couldn't because of work. Then the shootings started. It was out by Place de la République, but people started rushing into the bar in a panic, then some plainclothes cops showed up and told them to close the bar down and to keep us all inside. We were trapped inside the bar for hours. I kept taking swigs of absinthe, straight from the bottle, half expecting that the terrorists would shoot us right through the closed doors at any moment. By the time we felt safe enough to leave, the Metro wasn't running, so she gave me a ride home in her car. I was falling off my stool by that point."

"They have taxis and even Uber in Paris, you know..."

"Not that night. The Metro was closed, taxis were taking people out to the suburbs for free. It was absolute chaos. Took us forever to drive up to our place in La Défense."

"Even if I choose to believe you, which I don't, then why did she have to come up to our apartment?"

"I was having a hard time putting the key into the front lock. She had to help me upstairs."

"Did she also help you put your key into her lock? Wow! Did you 'rattle her lock,' too?"

"Don't be silly. She came upstairs, and we talked. Smoked some hash. That was it. I needed an emotional connection that night. I couldn't stand being alone. Everyone was convinced that the world was coming to an end."

"Emotional connection? Wow, that's a good one. Most people, when they're depressed, call their therapist or chew some Zoloft. Besides, emotional cheating is still cheating...In any case, you know very well that it's all bullshit because I found her panties under the bed, 'our' bed let me remind you. Did she need to take her thong off to give you 'emotional support?' Fuck you and YOUR emotional support. Where's MY emotional support? You should have been in LA with me. Not here with some whore."

"What panties? Those are your panties. Remember when we first got the apartment? We celebrated with a bottle of Veuve and a trip to that lingerie store up in Pigalle? You ended up running around the apartment swigging champagne; the thong must have ended up under the bed that night."

"You think I wouldn't recognize my own panties? Besides, what woman leaves her panties behind in a stranger's apartment? I'll tell you who. A total whore. She was marking her territory. Well, now she can keep you. I'm done."

Monica takes off, running down the boulevard directly into traffic. A Peugeot screeches to a halt just inches from her. I run after her and hug her where she's stopped. The Peugeot owner is beeping and cursing at us in Parisian verlan.

'Bouge toi, Puttane!'

"I love you, Monica. You are the best thing that has ever happened to me in my life," I whisper in her ear as traffic and curses move all around us. "I'll do anything to make it up to you. Anything!"

Monica looks into my eyes. She's deeply hurt and has a strangely determined look on her face.

"Fuck you!"

"I mean it, I'll die without you."

"Then go die. I'm going to jump the wall of Père Lachaise Cemetery and find Jim Morrison's grave."

"But why?" I knew that my answer was weak. But it was all I had.

"Why? There must always be a why? How about because The Doors were an LA band. And I'm from LA. Jim was an American in Paris, I'm an American in Paris...but the real reason, if you must know, it was something that Jean-Jacques and I talked about a lot but never got to do. We would get into these deep, philosophical conversations about the meaning of life and of 'Come on Baby, Light my Fire,' only he pronounced it 'Bebe.' We'd made plans to come to Paris someday to catch a punk-rock show and then jump the wall of Père Lachaise at night to sing to Jim by candlelight. And after tonight, I don't want to have any unfulfilled plans anymore. Look at all the pictures on that corner." She points back to the improvised memorial on Square du Bataclan. "Each and every one of those pictures represents millions of unfulfilled plans. And I don't want unfulfilled plans in my life anymore!"

I feel Monica pushing herself away from me. She's running back to the sidewalk. I follow her closely as she walks fast towards Voltaire Metro station and Rue de La Roquette, the street that leads directly to the gates of Père Lachaise Cemetery.

"Monica, wait. Do you want to sleep in a French jail? Because this is exactly how you end up in a French jail."

"Jail? Don't be stupid. What self-respecting French cop will be working at two in the morning on New Year's Day?"

"We've seen tons of cops tonight!"

"I don't care, I'm going."

With that, Monica takes off running uphill along Rue de La Roquette, towards the dark stone walls of Père Lachaise Cemetery up ahead. It's at this precise moment that I realize that I've never loved a woman more than I love Monica.

Continue reading for Free with Kindle Unlimited

Max Milano is the author of Hollywood Expats: A Story of Hollywood, Death & Love, available on Kindle Unlimited 

North Castile: 2000 Years Of Spanish History in One Afternoon

Part I Valle de los Caídos

The summer air in Madrid is immobile. It just hangs there, smothered in cigarette smoke and car fumes. Not a breeze to stir the smoke. Not even at night. Only that at night it's worse because everyone smokes like its going out of fashion. Perhaps it's the altitude. Madrid is, after all, the highest capital in Europe and it sits right in the middle of the high Castilian plain like a golden oasis in a vast rocky desert.

We're up in Chueca, Madrid's trendy hipster-alternative quarter. The outdoor cafes and rooftop bars are packed with the beautiful people soaking up the warm summer night under a dense layer of cigarette smoke. We're living in a 1940's noir movie set in Old Havana where all the dames smoke and the men wear white linen suits and Panama hats. We have to get out.

The next day we drive down La Gran Via, Madrid's main high street, at a snail's pace but in air-conditioned bliss. The noon traffic is crawling, but we don't care because the A/C on our rented Mercedes coupe is cranked up to 11, and we're heading north to escape the stifling heat of the city. Besides, we're eager to explore 2000+ years of Spanish history in one afternoon by driving north to Segovia via the Escorial and the infamous Valley of the Fallen.

Madrid just ends. There's no sprawl to speak of. One minute you're in La Gran Via, surrounded by fashion boutiques and massive billboards promoting Netflix shows, and the next, you're driving through dry badlands with black tar snaking ahead of you as the road hugs gentle hills that seem to get bigger and bigger the further north we go.

Soon the dry shrubs and olive groves of the Castilian plane give away to foothills dressed in pine forests. We're going up. The air cools down with the elevation, and we can see massive brown boulders stacked on the tops of hills above us. We're in the Sierra de Guadarrama, a mountain range that separates the northern reaches of the Castilian Plane from the rest of Castile & Leon.

"They get snow up here in the winter," Monica blurts from the passenger seat. She's wearing her big black Prada sunglasses and a broad smile. I know she's happy to get away from the unmoving air of Madrid. Something's unsettling about it. “Hemingway set the main parts of ‘For Whom The Bells Toll’ in these hills’,” she continues, “you know the part, when they’re trying to blow up that bridge…it was all set here, in these mountains.”

We stop at a guard post, pay our fee and are given driving directions to "The Cathedral."

"I'm surprised they call it 'The Cathedral’, " I tell Monica as we park in a mostly empty car park.

"I think the pope blessed it or something," she responds.

"Not the current pope, right? I hear he's a bit of a lefty".

"It was back in the '50s I think," Monica says, scrunching her nose against the bright sun peeking through the pines.

There's a low building ahead of us. More like a big step in the rocks with stairs leading up to a broad esplanade.

We walk up the steps and reach the esplanade. The tallest cross in the world looms above us. It seems to have sprouted from a rocky hill above the wide mouth of a tunnel carved directly into the rock ahead of us.

"I guess this is what they call 'The Cathedral'," Monica says, admiring the brutalist sight.

"More like Darth Vader's lair."

"Welcome to the Valley of the Fallen," Monica whispers as we approach the mouth of the cave. The entrance is massive; Cathedral sized in fact and crowned with a gigantic pietà statue carved in the same gray rock.

The Virgin Mary holds the sprawled body of Jesus above us. Their stone bodies are massive. It's a pitiful sight at first, but as we get closer, we notice that the Virgin's face is an evil looking skull under her hood of carved rock.

"Subtle," Monica says as we enter the massive cave with the feeling of walking into an abandoned subway tunnel built for a race of giants in the 1940s.

Monica holds my hand as we walk deeper into the tunnel. The first half of the cave is relatively barren. Just a corridor flanked by large rock statues of hooded figures carrying longswords with oversized crossguards. The swords are meant to resemble crosses. Onward Christian soldiers.

There's a narrowing ahead, and we enter the church section. There are pews, an altar and a massive Romanesque golden dome carved deep inside the rock. On the floor before the altar is Francisco Franco's tomb. Close by is Primo de Rivera's, the founder of the Spanish Falange.

At both sides of the altar, additional wings extend into the rock with the remains of hundreds of Civil War dead.

"So when are they yanking Franco out of here?" Monica whispers in the dim light of the altar.

"Soon, I hear," I respond. The air inside is even more stifling than Madrid's. "Let's get out of here," I tell Monica. I suddenly need fresh sunlight. I need to escape the weight of all the war dead, of the bombing of Guernica, and the tears of the hundreds of war prisoners who built this place.

As we leave the mouth of the cave, a man passes us by. He's walking inside the cave and holding a Spanish flag and a bunch of roses. Looks like the Falange is not yet dead.

"I guess he wants to visit Franco before he gets evicted," Monica whispers.

We'd been expecting a memorial/museum about the Spanish Civil war. What we found was a church-sanctioned monument to the Falange. Time to move on.

Part II El Escorial

Just over the hill from the Valley of the Fallen, we reach the town of El Escorial. King Philip II of Spain selected this spot to build his massive retreat in honor of St Lawrence (who was literally roasted by the Romans). The palace was designed in the shape of a gridiron in honor of the king's favorite saint on account of helping Spain win the battle of Lepanto against the Turks on St Laurence's day.

El Escorial gives the Vatican a run for its money with its cathedral-sized chapel and a library with frescoes and paintings by Titian and other masters.

We climb several stone stairways inside El Escorial and find ourselves in the mausoleum wing. King Philip II wanted to create a grand sepulchral pantheon for the Kings of Spain and other Habsburg nobles, and he did. One section looks like a massive multilayered wedding cake. It holds the remains of the countless princes and princesses that died in childhood. Close by is the very elaborate tomb of Don John of Austria, half-brother of the king, who led the victory at Lepanto only to die brokenhearted in Flanders awaiting for the arrival of the ill-fated Spanish Armada.

A dark stairway takes us down to the Pantheon of the Kings. It's a gloomily lit room of gold flake and dark wood with twenty-six marble sepulchers containing the remains of several Habsburg and Bourbon Kings (and one Queen) of Spain.

There's no other way out but to walk back up the same dark stairway. Halfway up there's a landing with a side door. This is the door to the "pudridero" of the rotting room where future tenants of the room below have to wait for up to 15 or more years before they are in a condition to fit inside the small urns that line the walls of the Pantheon of the Kings.

I keep climbing out, I need more air than ever. More stone passageways and stairways finally deliver us to King Phillip II's personal apartment. The bed looks so impossibly small for a King who ruled an empire where the sun never set. The king died in this room, surrounded by wooden carved saints and other icons. Miguel de Cervantes, who lost a hand at the Battle of Lepanto, and who later went on to write the first modern novel and Spain's biggest literary classic, Don Quijote of La Mancha, sneaked into Seville's Cathedral during a mass for the newly deceased King to recite a picaresque sonnet that made fun of the extravagant excess and expense of the funeral mass and also alluded to the King's infamous last days marred by horrible boils and severe incontinence:

"Y luego, incontinente,

caló el chapeo, requirió la espada

miró al soslayo, fuese y no hubo nada."

"And then, incontinent,

Pulled down his hat, put back his sword,

looked sideways, away, and there was nothing."

Part III The Alcázar of Segovia

From the barren landscape, we see the Alcázar rise like a giant ship up in the clouds. It's a magic castle straight out of the Disney movies, way up on a ledge. It seems to defy gravity, hanging there on the edge of a barren stone hill. You just don't know where the rock of the hill ends and the castle walls begin. Its pointy turrets reach up to the sky like a castle that belongs way, way further north. I stop the car and look at it. There's a town behind the castle, we can see a Romanesque basilica and medieval towers.

"Wow," Monica says, stepping out of the car, "It looks just like Cinderella's Castle."

"Hope we don't run into the Evil Stepmother inside."

"Queen Isabella was crowned there," Monica whispers. She's been reading about Isabella and Fernando and she's convinced that it was Isabella who wore the tights in that relationship.

When we go inside the castle we see more reminders of Isabella. There's a massive wall-sized painting of her coronation day. She stands by the castle entrance (Fernando was in Aragon that day) looking blond, young and pious. Isabella is dressed all in white and is surrounded by soldiers, priests, and nobles. A complex and violent Game of Thrones war lies ahead of her for the Crown of Castile. The King of Portugal was supporting Isabella's half-sister's rightful claim to the throne. But Isabella wasn't having it. The deceased king, her brother, was known as "The Impotent" and the heir to the throne was said to have been conceived by his right-hand man, Beltran. Hence Isabella's sister's nickname of La Beltraneja.

"Isabella convinced the nobles that La Beltraneja was a bastard," Monica whispers to me in front of the massive painting.

Isabella finally got her way, beating back the armies of the King of Portugal, and locking up La Beltraneja in a convent for the rest of her life. Then she spent the next few years expulsing the Jews from her realm and fighting the Moors in the Province of Granada until finally taking possession of the Alhambra Palace in 1492, where she decided to support Christopher Columbus's idea to sail west to reach China.

We stand in front of a pair of thrones. Above the thrones is Isabella's and Fernando's Motto: "Tanto Monta, Monta Tanto, Isabel Como Fernando."

The motto was meant to placate medieval minds that a woman got her strength from her husband, but in reality, Fernando just knew a good partnership when he saw one. His marriage to Isabella merged his kingdom of Aragon with Castile, without having to fight for it, and hence creating modern Spain (with all the regional separatist problems it still has to deal with today). At the time of their marriage, modern Catalonia was under Aragonese control and the North Basque country under Castilian. Navarra (the part on the Spanish side of the Pyrenees) eventually pledged alliance to King Ferdinand in 1512.

The Alcázar was originally a Roman Fort, the foundations are still Roman and can be seen on the way to the toilets in the basement. The wily Romans were responsible for building Segovia's famous aqueduct with the sole purpose of bringing water to their fort on this hill. Then along the way came the Moors and then the Castilians, who liked to build Castles on top of Moorish fortifications, hence the Moorish inspired name of Alcázar shared by many Castles in the Iberian peninsula.

Part IV The Roman Aqueduct

We leave the Alcázar and walk down narrow medieval streets towards the main Plaza. The sun is setting and bathing the ancient rocks in golden light. It's the golden hour, or 'la hora del paseo', as they call it in Spain when families leave their homes (previously shuttered against the heat) to enjoy the cooler breezes of sunset.

We walk under the 28 meter high arches of the Roman aqueduct as it glides over the plaza like in a dream.

"Queen Isabella loved the aqueduct," I hear Monica say as a Spanish guitar and laughter from kids fill the air around us. "She rebuilt the bits that were destroyed by the Moors."

Looking at the aqueduct that the Romans left behind is like looking directly into the past with your own eyes. These rocks are set in such a way that they don't require mortar to form such a thing of practical beauty: An aqueduct to bring water from the mountains into town, just like it has done for 2000 years.

A restaurant in the square is selling whole suckling pigs, grilled to golden brown perfection. A tapas bar next to it welcomes us in with cold San Miguel beer on draft and tapas of pork cracklings fried in virgin olive oil. Serrano hams hang from the ceiling, a requirement since Isabella's expulsion of the Jews and Moors to prove that the establishment is good and Christian. Never mind that most tavern owners during Isabella's time were conversos or converted Jews, hence the importance of the hams to prove the fervor of the converted. Or perhaps hanging hams was simply the smart thing to do when Isabella's inquisition was burning your neighbors at the stake.

I look at the old aqueduct on the plaza again and wonder how much history has it seen in its time. But yet the water continues to flow, just like some Roman engineer designed it to do 2000 years ago.

Max Milano is the author of Hollywood Expats: A Story of Hollywood, Death & Love, available on Kindle Unlimited