Argentera

The Beneficient Classes

Silversmith (Argentera): Silversmith carries the name of Street of the Silversmith Shops (Argenteria), the place where artisans dedicated to making small metal objects, jewellers and watchmakers, were concentrated. A few of these shops remain today. Their privileged location, between the Rambla—formerly Cabbage Plaza—and Four Corners, and with Independence Plaza—formerly Saint Augustine—across a walkway now converted into a bridge, made this one of the city’s most active business areas. 

She could not be represented in any other way than as an extremely elegant well-to-do woman, sheathed in a beautiful damask dress and profusely adorned with a bejeweled headband, earrings and a necklace. 

During a visit that Philip Gironès and Nuxu Perpinyà, two members of the Fal.lera Girona (Girona’s giant puppetry troupe), made to Joaquim Pla i Dalmau in his small office in the attic of his bookstore, he explained that in making this figure he was inspired by a real person: Mrs. Mundeta, or perhaps Mundet. She was a woman of good family, well-known for her participation in charitable causes. The resemblance, however, did not please her family members, who were dismayed that she would be immortalized in the figure of a “bighead” (capgròs). Therefore, it was decided that the similarity would remain appropriately hushed up.