Teatro Nacional...

...is lovely and absolutely worth the 3,000 colones (~7 dollars). The buildng is extraordinarily ornate--gold trim and paintings on almost every wall and ceiling--and all the details have a story. Here are a few of the stories that I can remember:

In the front entryway, there are three sculptures by Italians and one by a Costa Rican, all completed around the same time that the theater was being built in the 1800s. At this time, Costa Rica had no formal art institutions and was generally snubbed by high-class European artists. Someone whose name I forget was one of the few Costa Ricans who studied art in Italy and he was incredibly talented, much more than his Italian class-mates. When his work depicting John the Baptist as an infant in his mother s lap won the the work in the class award (I guess they did that in art school back then), one of the Italian students was so angry that he broke the finger off of the baby. Now that statue is the National Theater and the baby is still missing a finger.

The ceiling of one of the hallways has a painting designed by an Italian who had never been to Costa Rica, or anywhere in the tropics. So he painted white, blond haired women harvested coffee (the women probably would have darker skin and hair), coffee plantations next to the beach (coffee only grows in the mountains), and a man easily holding a large bundle of bananas (a bundle of bananas is much too heavy to lift). The list goes on. I'm glad that I have been here long enough to know that it's funny.

And (this is a cool bit of technology) the floor of the main theater hall lifts up to be even with the stage, allowing the theater to hold dances and galas. We did not see it, but the machinary is apparently an impressive contraction of wheels and things.

Great, educational tourist excursion. Tomorrow, some students and I will be going back to see a play by Lope de Vega, a Spanish playwright and poet from the 1600s. Professor Richter will be happy that I am following up on the Lope de Vega poems we read last semester in the Spanish Lyrical Poetry class.