A modern homage to a proud, cosmopolitan city where Gaudí, Picasso and Miró learned how to break all the rules.

Before Spain there was Catalunya, a thriving maritime empire with its own language and Barcelona as its capital, last bastion of resistance to Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Exploring 2000 of the city's history, Robert Hughes takes us down the Ramblas, through the "intestinal windings" of the ancient Gothic Quarter, past the bountiful Boqueria market to the Eixample, showcase of the daring, mannered architecture of Catalan modernisme, before resting at Gaudí's celebrated Sagrada Familia: crazy, unfinished symbol of this fiercely independent city of extremes.