CAFÉ
ADONIS 1940
Café Adonis 1940, located in the Gràcia neighborhood, is an establishment with over seven decades of history that has managed to adapt to the times without losing its essence. Its atmosphere combines tradition and modernity, offering a bright two-level space with large windows that fill the café with natural light. The outdoor terrace is perfect for enjoying a vermouth, a cocktail, or market-style cuisine in a warm and relaxed setting.
Over the years, the café has served as a setting for various audiovisual productions, thanks to its carefully designed aesthetics and cozy ambiance.
With a loyal clientele and an atmosphere that encourages conversation and enjoyment, Café Adonis 1940 remains a local landmark—a place that captivates visitors with its charm and culinary offerings and the shadow of the history.
THE SHADOW OF CARMEN BROTO
In postwar Barcelona, this place became more than just a café: it was a discreet stage where stories were whispered, where the routine of afternoon coffees mingled with confidences, furtive glances, and secrets that drifted like cigarette smoke.
They say Carmen Broto passed through there—the young woman who emerged from anonymity to become a myth. With her radiant beauty and aura of danger, “La Broto” embodied a Barcelona caught between the shadow of dictatorship and the decadent glitter of high society. Seated by the wide windows of the Adonis, surrounded by murmurs and glasses of brandy, she seemed to move within an ambiguous territory: half glory, half abyss.
Her murder, in January 1949, was brutal. The entire city spoke of her: of her powerful lovers, of the intrigues never clarified, of the official silences that shrouded the case. Since then, every place linked to Carmen Broto has been tinged with the aura of a crime novel.
At Café Adonis, that memory is made tangible in a quiet gesture: a photograph of Carmen presides over the bar, as if her gaze still watched over the comings and goings of patrons. Beneath that framed presence, the café preserves a secretive, melancholic air—a place where history blends with myth.
The impact of
Neue Tipographie
The Café Adonis logo is not an untouched relic of the past, but rather a contemporary design that seeks to faithfully and subtly recreate the typographic spirit of the 1920s to 1940s. The result is a piece that, though not original to the period, appears to have survived intact through time, as if it had been on the façade since the days when cafés were settings for conversations, secrets, and veiled glances.
The key lies in its typographic inspiration. Its bold, geometric forms recall the lead types of traditional printing, when typography was not yet a digital file but a physical object cast in metal.
The Germanic influence, the impact of Neue Typographie, formulated by Jan Tschichold in 1928, and the pedagogical legacy of the Bauhaus, with its emphasis on elemental forms, visual clarity, and the rejection of superfluous ornamentation.
The design operation is, in truth, a kind of imaginary typographic archaeology: not the rescue of an old logotype, but the creation of a new one that breathes the same atmosphere of the era. A deliberate anachronism that works as an aesthetic bridge between past and present.
Thus, Café Adonis becomes a place of double reading: for the passerby, a neighborhood café with an elegant and timeless logo; for the trained eye, a direct reference to the history of printed typography, to lead type foundries, and to the Germanic design currents that shaped graphic modernity in the first half of the twentieth century.
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