Teatro Nacional de São Carlos & Pessoa's Birthplace
Why is it significant?
In front of you rises a sober, pale façade with arches at street level: the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Lisbon's opera house. Now turn around and look at the apartment building on the other side of the little square, because on 13 June 1888, on its fourth floor, Fernando Pessoa was born.
Key Facts
| Place | Teatro Nacional de São Carlos & Pessoa's Birthplace |
|---|---|
| Address | Largo de São Carlos, 1200-410 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.70950, -9.14170 |
| Part of Walk | Pessoa's Lisbon: Poets, Bookshops and Lookouts of Chiado & Bairro Alto |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of you rises a sober, pale façade with arches at street level: the Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Lisbon's opera house. Now turn around and look at the apartment building on the other side of the little square, because on 13 June 1888, on its fourth floor, Fernando Pessoa was born.
Pessoa's father, Joaquim de Seabra Pessoa, was a civil servant who also wrote music criticism for the Diário de Notícias. So the future poet came into the world facing an opera house, in a family that went to the opera for a living. It did not last. His father died of tuberculosis when Fernando was five, his little brother died soon after, and his mother remarried the Portuguese consul in Durban. In 1896 the boy sailed to South Africa, where he would grow up speaking and dreaming in English.
The theatre itself is a child of catastrophe. The royal opera house by the river, inaugurated only months before, was destroyed in the 1755 earthquake. Lisbon's merchants paid for a replacement, and São Carlos opened in 1793, built in barely six months, its plan inspired by the San Carlo theatre in Naples. It was named after Princess Carlota Joaquina, the Spanish-born wife of the future King João VI.
Pessoa never forgot this square. In one of his best-known early poems he speaks to the bell of his village, a bell so slow and sad it seems to toll inside his soul. Readers have long linked it to the bell of the Igreja dos Mártires on Rua Garrett, which would have been heard from this window. The village was the middle of Lisbon. That is Pessoa all over... the city, felt as nostalgia, even while he lived in it.
He came back from Durban in 1905, aged seventeen, and never left Lisbon again. Now walk west, downhill along Rua Capelo and the side streets, to a quiet square on Rua do Alecrim where another writer stands, wrapped in a marble embrace.