Thursday, 1 September 2016

Lo! Cintra’s glorious Eden intervenes

"& above all of Cintra, the most blessed spot in the habitable globe" - Robert Southey

It has been pointed out to me that going to Sintra via Estoril is a strange route to take unless one's starting position is somewhere out in the Atlantic Ocean. That is obviously true and I stand corrected. I suspect that what I was really doing while sneering through the train window at Estoril's lack of scale was taking a day trip from Lisbon to Cascais. I'd rather go to Sintra anyway, it's a much nicer place. Byron must have liked it - although it was one of the many words that he couldn't spell properly - and he started writing 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' while he was there.


Everything in Sintra is divine. There is no corner that is not a poem.” -Eça de Queirós

That, by the way, is a quote from Os Maias, my favourite of his novels, and one that cries out for a BBC Andrew Davies adaptation. Eça de Queirós should rank alongside Dickens and Tolstoy and this book's main theme, explicitly stated, is one that the latter only alludes to in War and Peace; although Davies of course wasn't as reticent.




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