We woke up around 8:45am but spent some time cuddling in bed and only got up some time later. I made a coffee with the moka pot and the ground coffee kindly supplied by the apartment owner - unfortunately it was horrendous. We left around 11am looking for some breakfast and a decent coffee and elected to go to a cute place called La Gata En Bicicleta. It was quiet and the inside was littered with artpieces about the capirote(the pointed hat with holes for eyes that looks like the KKK uniform). I ordered what they called an andalusian breakfast because my wife had been wondering precisely about what residents typically ate for breakfast: it consisted of a café con leche, an orange juice and a sandwich with tomato, olive oil and jamon. It did not disappoint and I will be making it for myself this summer.
After breakfast we decided to go to the Museo de Bellas Artes, which is hosted inside another one of those gourgeous sevillan palaces with the colourful azulejos tiles and the courtyards with fountains in the middle. I was expecting something less and was instead pleasantly surprised by the quality of the artwork selection of the museum. Almost all authors were andalusian or at least worked in Sevilla for extended periods of time (it seems the most important of them was Murrillo). The paintings were arranged chronologically, starting from the second half of the XV century. It was fascinating to see how these first paintings still looked extremely medieval - they lacked perspective, had gold leaves like religious icons, etc. The Renaissance was in full swing in Italy but it had not yet spread all the way to Spain - I like to imagine what a spanish traveller to Italy must have felt like at the time, seeing paintings with a correct perspective for the first time in their life; maybe they thought "yeesh, modern art sucks", who knows. As you progressed through the exhibition you noticed how the painting techniques improved over time, as more and more innovations made their way to Spain from Italy and the Flandres - things like chiaroscuro, for example. A great instance of the latter was a painting by Giovanni Battista Caracciolo (neapolitan, one of the few non-andalusian artists featured), whose subject was the decapitation of John Baptist. John Baptist seemed to be heavily represented in most religious iconography we saw during our stay, with the decapitation being a repeated theme: during our stay we came across not one but two painted statues that consisted entirely and solely of John Baptist's decapitated head, complete with anatomically gorey details. Another thing that disturbed me somewhat deeply was the omnipresent angel heads that appeared in most religious paintings across different eras - disembodied putto/cherub heads supported by a pair of little wings. What made them nightmare fuel to me was that, intentionally or not, the faces of these disembodied cherubs were also most often deformed, as if made by a bad painter, whereas the main subjects looked normal (I suppose it's possible the heads were left to the painter's assistants/apprentices). Looking at them for extended periods of time started to feel like listening to a disturbing psychedelic b-side with choruses of distorted echoes of voices overlapping with themselves; it felt like that's what these "angels" would sound like.
After the museum we went to the Mercado Lonja del Barranco to have lunch. We labelled it "gourmet market" in the map we made ahead of our trip and indeed it was a bit of a posh place for tourists, although the food was authentic. We had some pinchos (tried my first morcilla) and a squid paella, and drank a couple of wine glasses (Hito Rosado [Tempranillo] and Polvorete [Godello]) whilst sitting outside in the rising heat. Once sated we got up, lathered up in sunscreen and walked down the river, in front of the iconic Torre del Oro. We saw two cats sizing each other up right on the banks. Then we took a turn and walked alongside the Parque de Maria Luisa until we got to the Casino de la Exposicion, which I had made a point of visiting because it was a filming location for "Lawrence of Arabia" (that movie was the whole reason we ended up in Sevilla). The building was closed, so we just walked around it and ended up back on the street. We stopped by a larger supermarket for stuff like milk, cookies (tortas de aceite, spanish cookies made with olive oil, really good), more wine etc. I bought a bottle of kefir to drink in the morning but later realised it was strawberry flavoured - in my defence, I didn't know the word for 'strawberry' in spanish and the bottle was white with only a tiny tiny strawberry pictured inconspicuously. I tried it anyway and it tasted horrible.
We rested for a bit at the apartment and then went to a wine place called Lama La Uva, but first we stopped again at Bodega Las Columnas for a quick beer and a slice of tortilla (I fed the crumbs to the pigeons because they were being polite). Lama la Uva was a place we would end up visiting repeatedly. We sat outside and drank wines recommended by the knowledgeable waitresses, sharing glasses between ourselves so we could try more kinds: we started with some reds, then rosés, finished with whites. I forgot to write down the reds' names but the rosés were Rosalito [Tempranillo] and Stigma [Garnacha, Syrah, Verdejo], and the whites were Pardevalles [Albariño] and Peñazuela [Garnacha blanca]. My wife humoured me because I unashamedly asked the waitress to let me take down the wines' names and compositions. The tables had 'no smoking' stickers on them which I thought were jokes, since we were outside. I asked a waitress about them and she told me the owner is vehemently anti-smoking, hence the stickers, but she was not there that day so I could go ahead and ignore it. Cool. We also had an interesting cheeseboard while there: a hard cow's milk cheese that tasted a lot like the alpine cheeses my father ships me; a crumbly goat cheese; a semi-soft rather intense blue cheese. We had some more food which was ok but somewhat overpriced (ordered a pork belly taco and it was almost hilarious how small a piece of pork belly was on it) - I honestly didn't mind, I was in it for the wines and those were great. While sitting there we saw a number of dogs being walked by and I pointed them all out one-by-one to my wife; we saw a little girl play by herself, stretching out the window grille of a first floor apartment; and a vast number of swallows crowding the sky between the palaces on the background of the setting sun, bouncing between them like billiard balls. The temperature finally went down.
We tried to have dinner at El Rinconcillo because it was nearby and we had recorded it in our map as one of the historical places, but there was a queue. We joined it at first but gave up shortly thereafter, as we overheard some fellow countrymen say the 10pm bookings were about to get there (it was 9:30pm). We went south and ended up at Taberna Águilas, which is right next to the restaurant where we had dinner the day before but is of entirely different character. Indeed, it is a honest tavern with simple but good food. We sat down and had espinacas y garbanzos (spinach and chickpeas "stew", which is a typical dish; loved it), artichoke with jamon and a montadito with lomo y queso. We drank a glass of house white which was supposed to be dry but tasted a little sweet and somewhat 'marsalato'/maderised (not my cup of tea, honestly). In the tavern there was an old lady, a regular patron, with a little dark grey terrier alongside her; she told us its name was Coco. We would end up seeing her and Coco repeatedly.
We went home afterwards and opened one of the bottles I had bought, a Manzanillo. Unfortunately I had made a mistake: it was a fortified wine and was 'marsalato'/maderised as well. Did not care for it.