Colegiata de San Isidro

This guide to the Colegiata de San Isidro in Madrid opens with the summer of 1936, when militiamen set the church ablaze during the civil war. It reaches back to its founding in 1620 as a Jesuit church modeled on Rome's Gesu, its century and a half under Saint Francis Xavier, and the 1767 expulsion that left it needing a new identity, one it found two years later when a farm laborer's bones arrived from across the city. Stand in front of the rebuilt facade and its twin towers as you listen.