?What beauties doth Lisboa first unfold,? gasped Byron?s Childe Harold and certainly the city is highly reminiscent of Paris decades ago. Her special quality consists partly from the exhilarating light falling on her blue-tiled walls and white stone pavements: a clarity assisted by cloudless skies. Indeed the climate was fabulous as, over the New Year, the sun not only shone it penetrated with a refreshing breeze coming off the Atlantic off whose coast Lisbon is the only European capital.
I spent my first night fully immersed at a fado venue Sr Vinho (www.srvinho.com) on Rua do Meio à Lapa and met with the owner Filipa Gordo, the daughter of Jose Luis a poet and the legendary fado singer Maria da Fé.
Over a glass of S. Sebastião Tinto (red) to go with my olives and cheese followed by S. Sebastião Branco (white) to go with my mango mousse, Filipa told me of the poems both old and new that they sing. The line-up included two women in starkly contrasting styles. Aldina Duarte stood still and upright as she bellowed forth while Vanessa Alves was ever the actress, extravert and gesticular. They sing out to a wall, to their fellow musicians and occasionally to the audience directly. The accompaniment, typically comprising of a viola and Portuguese guitar, often offsets their vocal ferocity by playing jolly, gentle bracing tunes.
The next day I was in Belém and near Lisbon?s main attraction, the Jerónimos Monastery is the Pastéis de Belém, a large, airy bakery-cum-café a...