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PORTUGAL

A city to climb

Lisa Ginzburg



Climbing up the steep bank of the River Douro, Porto is up and down the streets, steeples and bell towers.
Among Arab roots and influences post-industrial.

Far west of the city of Porto, where there the Douro River meets the Atlantic. Leaving the colorful beauty of Ribeira with houses along the river, the houses here are elegant, white buildings along deserted roads and regular Sunday, animated by just a few trees in bloom. At the bottom of the entry. It is a park, one of Fundaçao Serralves, with its museum. The largest park built in Portugal in the twentieth century.

In 1923 Carlo Alberto Cabral, second Earl of Vizela, inherited an enormous family's summer property decided to build a garden. He gathered together the best architects and landscape architects (among all Jacques Greber, that of the Jardins de Trocadéro in Paris). He approved their plans for intersections and geometry of meadows, steep hills of green, fountains, terraces and slopes, buildings. The Museum of Modern Art was built in 1996. Before that, in 1930, Villa-style art deco.

you walk between works by contemporary artists from around the world and then immediately go outside to soak in the green, come down stairs carved between streams and swirls of hedges and groves of bamboo. It is the same: same harmony, the sense of beauty. buffaloes, donkeys, lambs, high grass, ferns, lush green of spring. It seems to be in the countryside and not near the most visited museum in Portugal. "O verdadeiro artist assombrosa light source is human" ("The true artist is un'umbratile light source") contains a plaque in the museum. And of light and shade comprises not only the beautiful park surrounding the Fundação Serralves, but throughout the city.

The coexistence of reliability and simplicity Moreover, Porto is continuous. Thirty years after the end of a dictatorship not quite have had an impression that is metabolized set of hardness and great humanity. the tables of the bars in the center you can see old men with caps on his head worthy of the most ancient Sicily chat with women sitting with them (other than ancient Sicily), and that that exchange has nothing frantic or seductive.

entering one of the many churches assist at the baptism of a little girl whose dress was longer than those veils of a bride, and the joy of family blends the rigor of religion, the party to the severity of the sacraments. Even the light blue tiles , the tiles that decorate many roads and homes, speak together and beauty rule, but also are decorations apology and warning. Stud a whole wall of Estação de São Bento railway station considered among the finest in Europe, a lobby and an escape of binaries that are the most festive of invitations to travel.

The city is up and down the streets, towers, steeples round to evoke the ancient Arabs, gulls unusually fertile and flying low, almost grazing the houses. Ponte de Dom Luis I , as well as Maria Pia railway bridge (again, there is a hand French - they designed the first assistant of a Gustave Eiffel, the Eiffel much the same) leads to the other side.

Here, on the other side of the river, posted in large letters on the side of the same distilleries graced the billboards of port wine. The historical center and the commercial, the past of culture on the one hand, the other on this market, facing with absolute respect. Unlike
Lisbon the north rural / industrial warp of melancholy weaves the plot of austerity, a pride which is rooted in a pre-modern history (from Porto moves the Christian Reconquest against the Moors) and the recent re-emerging from the oppression of Salazar.

And if, unlike here in the south lacks the airiness of the Atlantic with Africa transit, the light of the racial and cultural miscegenation, more subtle chiaroscuro and wedged in the stone of time, however, help to better explain the ' Portuguese identity.

genuinely mysterious as the profiles of beautiful women in these parts, cameos of dignity does not alter but austere. The same as a country that is not in a hurry to grow and for this reason, it can be assumed to grow in the best way.

(Source: Travel Repubblica.it)