World Travel Guide

City Guide  - Lisbon  - Culture
Culture

The cultural scene in Lisbon today is a vibrant collage of old and new as the ghosts of Lisbon's grand past echo evocatively around today's venues. Lisbon offers a formidable number of venues and companies can often be found performing in such varied sites as outdoor parks and national palaces. The fortnightly Follow me Lisboa has cultural listings. For those who want to try their hand at Portuguese, the municipal government publishes the monthly Agenda Cultural (website: www.hpv.pt/lisboa/agenda/outras.html), which has a comprehensive set of listings (there is an English summary during the summer months).

Event tickets can be purchased at the Agência de Billetes para Espectáculos Públicos (commonly referred to as ABEP) - there is a kiosk in the southeast corner of Praça dos Restauradores.

Music: The Orquestra Sinfónica Portuguesa (Portuguese Symphony Orchestra) is now based at the Teatro Camões at the former Expo98 site in the Parque das Nações (tel: (21) 891 7753). The Gulbenkian Orchestra and Gulbenkian Choir are among those whose concerts are held at one of the concert halls and open-air amphitheatre of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Avenida de Berna 45A (tel: (21) 793 5131), adjacent to the museum. The Teatro Nacional de São Carlos, Rua Serpa Pinto 9, is where opera productions are staged during the September to June season (tel: (21) 346 8408). Classical concerts are also held here.

Other classical music ensembles include the Sinfonietta de Lisboa and the Orquestra Metropolitana de Lisboa. Major venues include the Coliseu dos Recreios, Rua das Portas Santo Antão 92 (tel: (21) 324 0580), and Teatro Municipal São Luís, Rua António Maria Cardoso 40 (tel: (21) 346 1260 or 346 2343).

Theatre: Among Lisbon's attractive theatres, the Teatro Nacional de Dona Maria II (tel: (21) 325 0800; website: www.teatro-dmaria.pt), at the top of the Praça de Dom Pedro IV (Rossio), is the most striking. Theatre and opera productions are also hosted in the Pequeno and Grande Auditório (Small and Large Auditoria) of the Centro Cultural de Belém on the Praça do Império (tel: (21) 361 2400; website: www.ccb.pt).

Dance: The Companhia Nacional de Bailado (Portuguese National Ballet) is based at the Teatro Camões in the Parque das Nações. Other venues that host dance performances are the Centro Cultural de Belém and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian.

Film: The world's oldest taxi driver and his 1928 Oldsmobile are the stars of the film Lisboa Taxi, which premiered in January 1997. Films are almost always shown in the original language, with subtitles in Portuguese. For English-language films, the best bets are the multiplexes in the larger shopping centres. The Diário de Notícias newspaper has film listings. There is a drive-in theatre at the north end of Parque das Nações with films showing at 2200 (cost: Esc1500 per car).

Cultural events: Since the sixteenth century, a procession of violet-covered litters has passed through the Graça district on the second Sunday of Lent in honour of Senhor dos Passos. The month of June sees some of Lisbon's most popular festivals, honouring a number of saints with parades and parties. Similar processions take place on saints' days in many of the surrounding villages.

Literary Notes
Portugal's most famous writer was Luís de Camões, whose sixteenth-century poem Os Lusíadas (1572) captured the spirit of the Portuguese Empire. The other famous name is the poet Fernando Pessoa - born in Lisbon in 1888. In addition to his poems, he was involved with Orpheu magazine (founded in 1914), which made a significant contribution to the cultural discourse of the time.

José Saramago, the Portuguese native who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998 is the author of História de cerco de Lisboa (The History of the Siege of Lisbon 1989), a fanciful retelling of the 1147 siege of the city.

Lisbon appears in other nation's works of literature as well. The 1755 earthquake, for example, appears as an important symbol in Voltaire's Candide (1759). Henry Fielding moved to Lisbon for health reasons and died here after completing the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755). Antonio Tabicchi's Declares Perreira depicts a newspaperman and his struggles against the oppressive Salazar dictatorship.



Copyright © 2001 Columbus Publishing
    
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