Balconies: streets on the air
March 19, 09 by Sergio Reyna
Lima, february the 19th, 1564. A man is about to die.
It is a warm summer after midnight, and a masked man is getting down a stepladder from a balcony. Suddenly the stepladder breaks, and the man falls to the ground. Five neighbors come over and start beating the man. When a sixth neighbor arrives, the man is already dead. The man´s name: Diego Lopez de Zuñiga.
This would have been another love affair story, but the man was the count of Nieva, fourth viceroy of Peru. The story appears in the “Tradiciones Peruanas”, written by the Peruvian author Ricardo Palma.
Balconies were silent witnesses of this kind of stories during much of the Spaniard colonial period in most of Peru, but especially in Lima.
