Malasaña

This guide to Malasaña in Madrid centers on Manuela Malasaña, a seventeen-year-old seamstress caught on the street on the second of May, 1808, during the uprising against Napoleon's occupying troops. It traces the martial-law crackdown that followed and the ordinary circumstance that made her one of its victims, then follows how the neighborhood came to carry her name. Listen for the broken stone arch in the nearby Plaza del Dos de Mayo, raised for two artillery officers who fell the same day.