Casa Fernando Pessoa: The Poet of Many Names
Why is it significant?
Stand opposite number 16 and read the façade: the name Fernando Pessoa, and lines of poetry climbing the wall. It is an ordinary apartment building on an ordinary street, which is exactly the point. Portugal's greatest modern poet lived here like a clerk, because that is what he was.
Key Facts
| Place | Casa Fernando Pessoa: The Poet of Many Names |
|---|---|
| Address | Rua Coelho da Rocha 16, 1250-088 Lisboa, Portugal |
| Geo Coordinates | 38.71670, -9.16240 |
| Part of Walk | Lisbon's Garden Hills: Aqueduct Water, Giant Trees & the Estrela Basilica |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand opposite number 16 and read the façade: the name Fernando Pessoa, and lines of poetry climbing the wall. It is an ordinary apartment building on an ordinary street, which is exactly the point. Portugal's greatest modern poet lived here like a clerk, because that is what he was.
Pessoa moved into a flat here in 1920 with his mother and family, and stayed until his death in 1935. By day he wrote business letters in English and French for trading firms in the Baixa. By night, in his room, he wrote some of the strangest and most beautiful literature of the twentieth century... and almost none of it was published while he lived.
His great invention was the heteronyms: not pen names, but whole invented poets, with their own biographies, styles and opinions, who argued with each other. Ricardo Reis, the classical doctor. Álvaro de Campos, the restless naval engineer. And Alberto Caeiro, the master of them all, a country poet who wanted only to see the world as it is, trees as trees, flowers as flowers, without thinking. After a morning of gardens, Caeiro is the right companion: he wrote that nature is parts without a whole.
When Pessoa died, he left a wooden trunk crammed with more than twenty-five thousand sheets of paper, poems, plays, horoscopes, lists, half-finished books. Scholars are still sorting them out. His last written words, scribbled in English in hospital, were: I know not what tomorrow will bring.
Since 1993 this house has been a cultural centre devoted to his work and to poetry, holding part of his personal library. And so the walk ends where water, trees and words meet: you began at the reservoir that gave Lisbon water, crossed its gardens, and finish at the door of a man who invented a whole crowd of poets to look at them. Tram 28 starts its long ride back across the city just a few streets away.