Entre a Baixa - Chiado (Lisboa) e a Rua do Ouvidor (Rio de Janeiro): patrimónios também literários

Abstract

with this paper we intend to approach the importance that writers and their respective works have over the (re)discovery and (re)reading of the cities, through the streets wandering, easing the creation of literary itineraries.

The comparison of an excerpt of Lisbon city – Baixa, Chiado, Bairro Alto – and of Rio de Janeiro – Ouvidor street – mirrored, respectively, in a novel by Branquinho da Fonseca (1905-1974) and in a work by Joaquim Leitão (1875-1956), contemporary authors, will serve as a basis to our tour. Indeed, the novel Tragédia de D. Rámon (1938), inserted in the collection Caminhos Magnéticos, and the book Do Civismo e da Arte no Brasil (1900), allows us, when walking through the streets from those cities, to understand their potential while a sociability, living and affections space. This potential is subjected to cultural and social dynamics that are inherent to it, in a specific time, filtered by the writer’s  look that is also a flâneur, an observer, a thorough reader of the city through the polyphonic record of the street(s) experience. In this intersection between literature and tourism we want to promote the pleasure of travel accompanied by writers and to make known other charms of these two “marvellous cities”.

In methodological terms we will do the heritages and locals survey that make up the work and will allow, through the content analysis methodology, the reading of the urban space. We will propose a tour that will serve as motivation for a visit where one will make acquaintance with the writers, rescue the memory and contribute to a differentiated tourism focused on personalization.

Lastly, the spatiality and the twentieth-century daily life in the city of Lisbon will be reinterpreted in a contemporary reading of these living spaces in constant transformation through the lens of one of the writer’s grandson, who will accompany us, Luís Branquinho da Fonseca Soares de Oliveira, Cinematographer.

By adapting to the movies Branquinho da Fonseca’s novel, A Tragédia de D. Rámon, under the title Caminhos Magnéticos, – debuted in Brasil in 2018 and in Portugal, in 2019 - the director Edgar Pêra invited two brasilian actors: Ney Matogrosso,  to interpret a ‘spirit’ called André, and the actress Helena Ignez.