This study examines the depiction of Madrid by Benito Prez Galdós in his novels Fortunata y Jacinta, Miau, and Misericordia, as illuminated by Walter Benjamins view of nineteenth-century Paris in the Arcades Project. Drawing on Benjamins concepts of allegory, phantasmagoria, the interior, and Messianic time, I argue that Galdós inclusion of both material and spiritual aspects under the aesthetic category of realism is best understood as an effort to reflect the interpenetration of religious tradition and narratives of progress in modern society. In the novels studied here, the religious does not function merely as symbolic allusion or anticlerical critique, but rather signals a Benjaminian exposure of the phantasmagoric syncretism of Providence and progress, a gesture which in turn allows the work of art to create new relationships between sacred and secular.