The beauty of Lisboa — that the Portuguese pronounce Lisboua — is astonishing. According to Humboldt the geographer — the greatest traveler of his time — it stands, with Constantinople and Naples, as one of the best located, best positioned cities in the universe.
From the Praça do Comércio one can see the landscape that extends beyond the southern bank of the river. It is quite unattractive — a flat, monotonous, featureless landscape. Lisbon, on the other hand, should be seen from this bank, from the opposite bank of the river. You pay a small toll, and one of the small boats that ply between one bank and the other will take you there. Then you can observe over the broad waters of the Tagus how the tide swells or shrinks, raises or sinks, according to the moment, the wondrous amphitheater of the city astride the undulations, humps, and depressions of its famous seven hills. There is little in Europe that can rival this magnificent spectacle. Once seen, it’s never forgotten. It is a vista devoid of ugliness that contains not a single item that human love of measure rejects. In that sense it is gracefulness by the grace of God.
The history of Lisbon is severed by the earthquake of 1755 that destroyed most of the city. Very few traces remain of what existed before that horrendous eruption. Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan has a description of the city as it was before the earthquake: a small, narrow, Gothic walled city with a suspicious, unfriendly demeanor. The Marquês de Pombal, a friend of Rousseau and Voltaire, rebuilt it with French, Italian and Portuguese architects. Given the dominant ideas when it was reconstructed, it is only natural that Lisbon — the Marquês de Pombal’s, I mean — should be similar to neo-classical cities in the era of enlightened, absolutist monarchies. Neo-classicism was the taste defining the century of Louis XIV and the court of Versailles. The palace of Versailles was in fact the starting point for this taste that shaped every expression of European culture and left remarkable architectural landmarks.
The Lisbon earthquakes stirred deep emotions throughout the world. The scenes of chaos and pain they threw up, the astonishing number of dead and injured they caused, were an obligatory topic of conversation for years to come and were deployed in the intellectual polemics that raged at the time. Voltaire used them to fight Leibnitz’s philosophy of sufficient cause, pre-established harmonies and all that amusing nonsense: that this world is the best of all possible worlds. Candide and Dr Pangloss are in Lisbon during the earthquake: “Streams of flames and ashes covered streets and public places; houses turned to sand, roofs collapsed, foundations were obliterated; thirty thousand inhabitants of all ages and sexes were crushed under the ruins.” Candide was injured. A thoughtful Pangloss asked himself: what could be the sufficient cause of this phenomenon? A deep, grotesque, erratic disciple of Leibnitz, a complete nonentity, Dr Pangloss witnessed the Lisbon earthquakes and posed the problem of what might be its sufficient cause. He couldn’t find one. However, this lack of explanation didn’t lead to a change of criterion. He continued to affirm that this is the best of all possible worlds — “car tout est bien.”
An urban amphitheatre rolls over the hills of the Marquês de Pombal’s Lisbon. This constant up and down of the city’s streets gives it huge character and the liveliest sense of movement. Strolling along its labyrinthine streets, you find yourself at roof level as easily as you feel you are going underground. To look at a terrace roof, you must sometimes look down; at others, you must raise your eyes to the heavens to find a front door. The upshot is that you enter houses through the attic or the cellar. It all makes for a most entertaining urban agglomeration: a fascinating, animated place. Perhaps in the long term, life apparently lived on scales constantly going up and down may become rather irksome. One thing, however, is undeniable in my opinion: this part of Lisbon is unique, a sight that can never leave you cold; it’s what Lisbon has that thousands of other cities will never have.
I think the color of this district is particularly beautiful. The frantic urban bustle brings out its best. Towards dusk, when a pink or even crimson bank of clouds comes between city and sun, and diverts and dissects the sun’s rays, as the fan of cloud opens and closes, the city seems to refresh one’s face and chest …
Lisbon’s light and color is so malleable, has such a quivering, fleeting movement it is hard to pin down adjectivally. Sometimes the light — for an instant — is a youthful, fleshy pink, as if the city were blushing like the skin of an adolescent cheek; a second later the pink vanishes and the light turns an ivory pale. The atmosphere over Lisbon becomes a crucible of glinting carnation tints that airily finger the red roofs, the warm whites of the walls, the fresh or watery green of the shutters, the pumpkin hue of the façades, the crumbling toast of the old walls, where parasitic creepers hang down or a lofty palm tree soars in the sun, shamelessly lethargic, suffused by a reek of perfume. Sometimes the air has a crystalline purity that never hardens — a warm, amicable purity; sometimes watery damp creates atmospheres that seem to give weight and density to the color, imbuing it with an intense life. This fleeting passage of carnal tints across the Atlantic light — the light in the wind — sweeps over the undulating hills relishing their flight, giving each moment a distinct mark, determined to be born, to live for a moment, and then die …
The earthquakes in the eighteenth century didn’t destroy every trace of the past. It is very likely, for example, that seismic movements didn’t demolish all the Gothic. However, the Marquês de Pombal was a man of the Enlightenment and the Enlightened thought that the Gothic represented pure barbarism. The rebuilding of Lisbon was probably lethal for medieval architecture. It hardly needs to be said, on the other hand, that Pombal conserved and restored buildings in the so-called Manuelline style, even though they were probably less valuable than the older style.
When Portuguese navigators reached the Indies in their journeys around the world, they ruined the Republic of Venice’s trade. The Venetians bought in ports in the heart of the Mediterranean everything that was transported there by caravans from the remotest parts in Asia. Using all their ingenuity they organized and sustained highly complicated expeditions, which paid countless tolls to the authorities at different points on the caravan routes. The Republic of Venice’s influence on Asia is one of the most extraordinary phenomena in history and one of the most fertile in its consequences. Marco Polo penetrated deep into China … However, Venetian trade was built on a system — caravans, tolls, and tithes — that made the merchandise very expensive. The Portuguese transported goods by sea and sold at much more reasonable prices. Venice went into decline. The Mediterranean experienced a reduction in shipping that lasted for centuries. The opening of the Suez Canal reinvigorated it.