Lisbon, by New York Times

O jornalista Frank Bruni conta como se apaixonou, inesperadamente, pela nossa capital, menina e moça: How I Fell for Lisbon é o destaque desta semana do suplemento Travel, na edição deste domingo, no New York Times:

I didn’t expect romance, but this city had other ideas. No must-see list or hard-fought reservations. It lets you in.

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WE meet the places we wind up loving much the way we meet the people we fall for: on purpose and accidentally; at precisely the right moment and exactly the wrong time.

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We didn’t plot a route. We intuited one. So the beauty we encountered was serendipitous: the mosaics of black and white stone with which so many of the sidewalks, esplanades and plazas are paved; the tiles — yellow, green, white — with which so many of the buildings are faced. Mosaics like these I’d seen elsewhere, though they had a special dominance and whimsy here. But tiles like these, used this way, were a revelation. It was as if Lisbon wore a set of jewels that other cities didn’t bother to.

We climbed higher. And higher. And soon two colors took precedence over the others: the red of the roofs, terraced on the hillsides below us; and the blue of the Tagus River and the harbor, flashes of which entered and exited our field of vision depending on where we were standing. A major port in a country with a rich and proud seafaring history, Lisbon has a connection to the ocean — the Tagus meets the Atlantic only a dozen or so miles away — that is essential, intimate and palpable. It’s one of those places that’s not just on the water but of the water.