BURDELES, PICADEROS Y LUPANARES

Madrid was not always a decent city. It was also, for centuries, a showcase of desire, misery, hypocrisy, and business. Brothels, brothels, and houses of ill repute take us on a literary, historical, and roguish journey through that backroom that almost no one talks about or wants to remember... prostitution in our country and, most notably, in Madrid, the capital of prostitution. With Javier Rioyo's sharp prose, these pages traverse brothels, brothels, houses of ill repute, alleys, salons, and houses of idleness and debauchery, it touches on Imperial Rome, the Middle Ages, the Golden Age, and modernity, and shows us how pleasure and power have always coexisted in the shadow of public morality. Because, behind the official discourse, the city has had another life. Nocturnal, clandestine, roguish, and, at times, tragic. Thus emerge the names and shadows, women driven to survive, respectable clients, pimps, middlemen, censors, doctors, police, and politicians. Also chroniclers, artists, and onlookers, fascinated by this world condemned by day and consumed by night. Rioyo does not moralize. He narrates, recalls, investigates, and provokes. And in doing so, he paints a portrait of Spain more real than many textbooks. A country where the body was currency, hypocrisy an unwritten law, and the double life a national tradition. A book of history and the streets. Of ink and skin. Of uncomfortable memory. Because there are cities that are best understood from their back doors.