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John Huxtable Elliott took advantage of a long summer vacation in 1950 to travel to Spain with some friends in a beat-up van. At the time, the Cambridge student knew almost nothing about the country, nor did he understand a word, but he suddenly fell in love with Spain and its tradition while contemplating the portrait of the Count-Duke of Olivares in the Prado Museum and, above all, chatting with their peoples. “What surprised me the most was the enormous dignity and generosity of some people who lived in quite deplorable conditions, especially in the south. It was my first contact with extreme poverty », he recalled years later. He slept in seedy pensions and survived thanks to the food that people gave him, a gesture that the author of some of the most important history works of the Spanish 20th century never forgot.