As a child, the story goes, Federico García Lorca would visit family in the south of Spain. He would sneak into a dry well that used to be shared with the neighbors, the Albas. He could hear the private conversations of the reclusive, mysterious family, whose widowed matriarch kept an iron rule over her daughters.
Garcia Lorca later used this as the inspiration for one of his most famous plays, “The House of Bernarda Alba,” which he finished just weeks before he was killed in 1936 at 38. His slaughter almost certainly was carried out by the fascist forces of the burgeoning Spanish Civil War, who despised his left-leaning politics and his reputed homosexuality.
