Unlike most of the great cities of Castile, it rises gently from the meseta. And heroisms of the mind, rather than of blood, speak in the smolder of its ancient body. The River Tormes is urbane, almost European. It passes waving willows and lush fruit trees; washes the shaded soto where the monks met to platonize with Luis de León upon the Names of Christ. A Roman bridge leads low to the city. Here once stood a granite bull by means of which the wily beggar knocked wisdom into the head of Lazarillo. And the streets climb up through the mud. Walls crumble with the hillside under the town. An ancient church stands on the bank surrounded by the mire; and houses, foul with age, their carved seals moldered, limp like proud beggars up the sharp incline. The Cathedral is a soft gold crest in the sun: at its feet are waves of convents, consistories, churches, schools. The central streets are paved with cobble stones. The houses are low and the glass of their windows is out of place, so new it gleams within the soft senility of walls. Dogs, children, refuse clutter up the streets. Everywhere one feels the elemental base--a hill--on which this young culture of Christian Spain has builded. In the churches, five centuries are confused. The Old Cathedral is Romanesque; with its chaste columns and its nave a petrified forest, it stands beside the scintillance of the plateresque New Cathedral. Nearby is a Dominican convent in which a queer mariner named Columbus found refuge and support in a scheme rejected by most of the Crowns of Europe. The seventeenth century baroque of the Churrigueras flaunts its high monstrosities beneath ornate ceilings. Much of the gold arrogance of this convent is a result of that mad scheme of Columbus. But the man himself is closer to the streets; for here one still encounters at least in spirit the pícaro, the monk half-saint, half-satyr, the immortal Celestina. A Jesuit convent rears its chill harsh walls in the town’s heart: a symbol of the ruthless might of the Company of Jesus, of its enormous logic. And everywhere, the alleys limping up, limping down, between the homes of the Church. This Salamanca, fixed in the eras of Isabel, Carlos, Felipe II, has aged; has not changed. The dirty streets are the same; the low blind precincts of the poor (Cervantes lived here once) and the dominant recurrent periods of church and tower. Life’s anarchy is here controlled by learning. Every crooked street is righted by a convent; every lurch of alley is stopped by a square. And the whole town is mastered by the Plaza Mayor--a square as correct as a schoolman’s syllogism. Its sides are unvariant four-storied walls; it is colonnaded equally and equally façaded; it is the noble, proper heart of a town which has argued unity in Christ through seven rank chaotic hundred years....