Today was supposed to be without purpose, laid back and relaxing. No hike to any hilltop fortress, no wandering cold empty palatial hallways, no room-by-room exploration of museum antiquities, nope, just roving the crooked streets of Lisbon taking advantage of sunny seventy-degree weather.
Then Ella mentioned something about porcelain sculptures near the Museo de Lisbon in the northeastern section of the city. It wasn’t within walking distance, so we hopped on a bus to get to the metro and joined the swarm of hustling younger folk descending into the bowels of Lisbon and followed the green arrows for the Verde line. This was my Portuguese metro initiation and it left me a total convert. Cheap, fast, and uncrowded, surface travel seems like taking a horse and buggy in comparison.
The Lisbon Museum is in the Palácio Pimenta, an early 18th Century manor in the middle of a more modern university neighborhood. The manor’s rooms have been converted into exhibits that briefly explain the history of Lisbon from the Romans to the Visigoths, Moors, and crusading Christians, then, more expansively, all the way from the creation of a naval empire up to the present day. It was a lot to take in, but I tried my best to keep Ella from lingering on the park bench outside in the midst of a peacock screech fest. In sum, observing how the city evolved, I’d have to swear fealty with the Roman legionnaires that I kept company with in a former incarnation. Open air temples, marble baths, sunny forums, one doesn’t have to be a renegade monk to loathe the cold fortress enclosures that followed, or the scurvy ridden armadas that, along with spices, brought back the plague.
I had to check my post-Roman conquest denigration of Lisbon’s history when I made it through the park and the preening peacocks to an exhibition of Lisbon in the 1920s. Culturally it was as jazzy as Paris, Weimar Germany, or New York. My monk, having served his penance shoveling coal into the hellish maws of the power station and been reincarnated as a licentious silent filmmaker, would have gone unnoticed, almost as unnoticed as these documentarians I caught in the act.
Out under the trees where the peacocks roamed, Ella was wondering where the porcelain statue garden she’d read about was hidden. We opted for going in the direction of an arched opening we saw in a nondescript wall on the other side of the park.
At first glance inside the wall there appeared to be a garden of hedges marking out flower beds and fountains. Then in the nearest clump of roses we noticed a glazed porcelain swan being devoured by a glazed porcelain wolf. Whoa!
That was just the beginning. In flower bed by flower bed, porcelain creatures revealed themselves. There, behind that hedge, a giant snail; out of the flower bed a bursts a giant bee. Is that a giant crab? Giant frogs in fountains ready to spring, salamanders climbing walls, monkeys hanging from trees, painted porcelain mutations feeding on the natural plant life. What a treat!
And then, to finish off our metro excursions, we went back towards the south west end of Lisbon to see the National Pantheon. Big dome, 360 view of the city. Flashbacks to Duomo vertigo in Florence. On the ground floor, a circle of tomb reliefs, one of which was dedicated to our old bullying administrator, Afonso, Duke de Albuquerque.
