Salamanca

 This is how I like my Spanish cities: really old.

After the jump (i.e. the "Read more"), a few more photos and a bit of commentary.

There are two cathedrals, Old (constructed 12th/14th centuries, Romanesque/Gothic style) and New (16th/18th, Gothic/Baroque).

This, in the Convent of San Esteban, is about as baroque as it gets:

The capitals on the columns are Ionic, but the shafts are in the style known as barley-sugar -- twisted like licorice -- with grape vines wrapped around them.

Headless...saints, probably?

At some point almost all of the saint figures were pulled down from the facade of the New Cathedral. Maybe these are left over from that event?

I enjoyed seeing this label on an old building:

I can't speak to the particular circumstances in Spain, but for centuries, throughout Europe, philology was the study of old texts. In the mid-19th century it broke apart into various fields of text-based study, and nowadays philology means the study of languages. Not so long ago, however, it meant the study of what we now call the humanities.