The most recognisable of Spanish literary characters is a rich landowner who, obsessed by tales of knights and crusaders, sold all his properties bit by bit for books. When he had nothing left, he set out riding on an old skinny horse with a crass, foul mouthed servant as his aid, looking for a dame who turns out to be a fat ugly lady. Instead of calling him a nut, the author of the book called him ingenioso, ingenious. Fast forward to present day Madrid to find major statues of an imagined Quijote y Sancho, places named Dulcinea, streets named Cervantes. It’s the symbol of ideals so big you’d be willing to give everything to attain them, and no cause too small.

Walking around the network of laneways that make up the centre of Madrid you find snippets of how these ideals have evolved. People are quite happy to wear their colours: stickers for ‘freedom to the socialist unionists’ on garage doors; t-shirts that say ‘torture is not art or culture’ (a reference to bullfighting); the old man who picks a different site every day of the week to hold a placard denouncing major supermarket chains as terrorists; a mob of punks and radicals that meet every Sunday to sell everything from pins and stickers by obscure anti-neo-nazi groups to books on radical politics.

I walk into a second hand bookshop to find a mess of bookshelves covering mainly history and specializing in the Civil War, on one wall an old resistance poster. The owner of the shop is happy to help me browse for what she thinks will be a book that gives a balanced account of the war. She explains there are books that lean to either the fascist or the socialist views of history, and says she ‘has to’ stock both, with a tone of ‘I wouldn’t give the fascists an inch of shelf space but that’s modern life’. I walk out with a collection of chronicles by an Argentine journalist who joined the international (resistance) brigades. The owner wasn’t exactly sure it would be the most balanced account of the war, but she didn’t tell me to not buy it either...

Go back further to Goya’s 19th century. The Spanish were under occupation by Napoleon’s forces until 1812 – the year they won independence from the French (funny that a nation that still had colonies had to fight for independence!). After the victory, the lord of Madrid invited artists to portray heroic moments of the uprising. Goya comes up with two works that have been considered among his masterpieces since then: 2 de mayo and 3 de mayo de 1812, in the 3 de mayo the uprising of the people against the Moroccan soldiers the French had hired seems like a mob assault, hardly any traces of heroism there. Goya at this stage was by this time increasingly cynical about the nature of war, yet the lords of Madrid saw the painting for what it was, and hung it on their walls until eventually it was moved to the Prado Museum.

A very different story played out for the works that now make up the Civil War Art pavilion in the Reina Sofia Museum, an impressive collection of war photography, resistance posters, fascist propaganda and the darling of the Museum, Picasso’s Guernica.

Almost two hundred years later revellers congregate around Plaza 2 de mayo in the Malasaña barrio well into the small hours. When police try and get people to circulate, a riot breaks out that goes on for two days. From a Saturday in that district I can tell why: the streets are flooded with people until early Sunday morning, yet nobody complains, residents just soundproof their houses. You wouldn’t dream of it inner city Melbourne.

First impressions of Spain from three days in Madrid: a country that respects and even admires someone who fights for a cause; despite that, a nation that was quite comfortable with crushing their opponents at whatever cost, be it the French, the Indians in the colonies, or the socialist republicans; a place that likes to live on the edge between party and riot. This is where Amelia and I will be for the next month, please follow us.