Hat, round glasses, triangular moustache. This is a simple sketch of the most complex poet Lisbon has ever produced. It was June 1888 and Fernando Pessoa was born under the sign of Gemini.
We’ll never know for sure how many people lived in Fernando Pessoa (apart from the heteronymous poets), but we know exactly where they all lived together, when Chiado still couldn’t speak English.
But Fernando Pessoa already spoke and the future was with him, in 1925 he wrote in English, “Lisboa, o que o turista deve ver”. What Pessoa didn’t know was that what the tourist wanted most was to see him rhyming with Lisbon.
Pessoa passed-well in Brasileira, widened Largo do São Carlos, electrified o 28, got drunk in the botequins, smoked in the tobacconists, pranced in the barbershops, thought and discussed in the cafés and ended up in the Mosteiro dos Jerónimos.
A genially restless life, tattooed between the house in Campo de Ourique and that lonely table in Martinho da Arcada. Here’s a bit of Pessoa’s Lisbon:
Café Martinho da Arcada – Praça do Comércio, 3
Casa Fernando Pessoa – Rua Coelho da Rocha, 16
Café A Brasileira – Rua Garrett, 122
Largo do Carmo
Livraria Bertrand – Rua Garrett, 73
A Licorista – Rua dos Sapateiros, 218
Largo do São Carlos
Mosteiro dos Jerónimos
Praça do Império
Casa Fernando Pessoa, a vida e a obra de um dos maiores escritores do mundo