Rua do Diário de Notícias, Bairro Alto
Why is it significant?
Stop in this narrow, straight lane, where washing hangs between the balconies and the shutters are still closed if it is morning. Bairro Alto sleeps late and goes to bed very late, but for well over a century its loudest sound was not music from the bars. It was the thump of printing presses.
Key Facts
| Place | Rua do Diário de Notícias, Bairro Alto |
|---|---|
| Address | Rua do Diário de Notícias, 1200-141 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71280, -9.14460 |
| Part of Walk | Pessoa's Lisbon: Poets, Bookshops and Lookouts of Chiado & Bairro Alto |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop in this narrow, straight lane, where washing hangs between the balconies and the shutters are still closed if it is morning. Bairro Alto sleeps late and goes to bed very late, but for well over a century its loudest sound was not music from the bars. It was the thump of printing presses.
Notice how straight the streets are. Bairro Alto was laid out in the early 1500s as a planned extension of the city, a grid on a hill, at the moment Lisbon was growing rich on the sea route to India. The Jesuits arrived in 1553 and built their great church at the top. Because the quarter stood on firmer rock, much of it rode out the 1755 earthquake better than the Baixa below.
This lane used to be called Rua dos Calafates, the street of the caulkers. It took its present name from the Diário de Notícias, founded on 29 December 1864 by Eduardo Coelho and Tomás Quintino Antunes. It was cheap, it was sold on the street by newsboys, and it promised news rather than party propaganda, which was quite a novelty. Remember Pessoa's father, the music critic? This was his paper.
Around it the whole district filled with print. Typesetters, editors, reporters and poets worked through the night, and the taverns stayed open to feed them. Satirical sheets, political dailies and literary magazines came off presses in these lanes, and a writer could walk from his editor to his printer to his favourite tavern without ever leaving a few blocks. The newspapers moved out in the twentieth century, and the night-time crowds you will see later are, in a way, the ghosts of those night shifts.
One great paper even gave its name to a street. Walk a few hundred metres west and slightly downhill to Rua do Século, where the rival of the Diário de Notícias had its home, and where a far more powerful man was born.