Poblet Monastery

He befriends, in these school years, two boys who will remain close to him for the rest of their lives and whose friendship will shape the earliest ambitions of his imagination in ways none of the three could have predicted while they were still children trading sketches under a schoolmaster's disapproving eye.

One is Eduard Toda i Guasch, a boy whose restless curiosity about the wider world will eventually carry him to a career as a diplomat and archeologist of some renown, a man who will one day rediscover and help restore the ruins of Poblet Monastery.

The other is Josep Ribera i Sans, quieter than Toda but no less earnest in his devotions.

Together, the three boys, none of them yet possessed of any real means, none of them yet more than schoolboys with too much imagination and too little to occupy it, conceive a project that in hindsight reads almost as prophecy.

They resolve to restore the ancient half-ruined monastery of Poblet, the resting place of the medieval kings of Aragon and Catalonia, a vast complex of stone that had been sacked and partly abandoned decades earlier during periods of civil upheaval and anti-clerical violence that had swept through Spain.

It is, of course, an impossible ambition for three boys with no money, no authority, and no training.

They cannot lay a single stone.

But the impossibility of the project does not stop them from designing it in careful, earnest detail, drawing up what they half-seriously, half-solemnly call a Sociedad Espiritista, a spiritual society dedicated to the restoration and even, in their most fevered imaginings, the establishment of a kind of ideal community among the monastery's rebuilt walls.