Literary places in Lisbon

Mapped

• 1982

  The Book of Disquiet

  Fernando Pessoa

  The factless diary of Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who fixes almost his entire life to a few blocks of the Lisbon Baixa. The map keeps to the grid he names again and again: Rua dos Douradores, where his office and rented room stand, the parallel Rua da Prata, the Rossio at the head of the lower town, and the Tagus riverfront where the pavement runs down to the water at Cais das Colunas.

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• 1984

  The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

  José Saramago

  In 1936 Ricardo Reis, one of Fernando Pessoa's poetic alter egos, returns from Brazil to Lisbon just after the poet's death, and drifts through the rainy city, visited by Pessoa's ghost, as fascism rises across Europe and Salazar's shadow deepens at home. Saramago maps a real Lisbon: the hotel where Reis lodges, the cemetery where he speaks with the dead Pessoa, the viewpoint over the Tagus, the river and its docks, and the watchful capital of the New State.

  5 places →