Some are linked to facing buildings, making of the street below a dim and silent tunnel. Even by such standards, the Carrer de Sant Llorenc is more a dark alley than a street. Turned into a stairway to ease the pedestrian climb, it levels off at the doorway of a massive building. But beyond the door, the gloom is suddenly lifted as one steps into an airy alcove leading onto a bright, sun-splashed patio. There, flowered vines are cascading down from surrounding balconies.
Arched recesses break the stone walls, and a profusion of plants line the gleaming granite floor.
It is paved with slabs the color of earth except for the center where white, beige and brown blocks are formed into an enormous Star of David. This is the heart of the Call, the legendary medieval Jewish community of Girona where the Kabbalah was first written down. For nearly 500 years, it lay buried, literally sealed off, as houses and streets were, in successive layers, built over it. Now in an ambitious restoration project, Gironans are digging down through levels of construction and back through centuries to unearth a part of Jewish and Catalan history that began at the start of the ninth century, ended at the close of the fifteenth, and then slowly faded from public memory until it was completely forgotten. They did not like to live near the ground so they built apartments over the old ones.