A Literary Walk Through Lisbon With Pessoa, Saramago and Night Train to Lisbon

I arrived in Lisbon already half in love with it, because I had read it first. Years of novels had built a whole city in my head, full of melancholy streets, rain on tiled walls and men in hats thinking far too much in cafés, and I wanted to know whether the city on the page and the city on the hills were the same place.

The answer is partly, and it’s complicated, but then again, most good relationships are.

Pessoa’s Baixa: The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa is Portugal’s great modernist poet, a man who wrote under dozens of different names and personalities, which honestly explains a lot about my group chats. In The Book of Disquiet, his narrator, Bernardo Soares, is an assistant bookkeeper who works and daydreams on the Rua dos Douradores in the Baixa, the neat grid of streets down by the river.

I walked there late one afternoon, past shops closing up for the day and people heading home with bags of groceries, and suddenly I understood the book in a whole new way. It’s about a small, ordinary life inside a beautiful city, full of interior weather. Nothing much happens on the outside, while everything happens on the inside, and standing there, I finally got it.

Afterward, make your way to the statue of Pessoa outside A Brasileira, a café in Chiado that he used to frequent, where tourists line up to take selfies with him. He looks like he would absolutely hate it, and I took one with him anyway, because I’m only human.

Saramago’s rain: The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

José Saramago, Portugal’s Nobel Prize winner, set The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis in a damp, gray Lisbon in 1936, with Europe darkening and rain falling on everything, so in my mind, Lisbon was always wet.

I got exactly one rainy day on my trip and was absolutely thrilled about it, because that is the day for Saramago (and yes, being excited about rain on vacation tells you everything you need to know about what kind of traveler I am). The tiles shone, the hills turned slippery and treacherous and the river went silver, until the whole city looked like it was being written in real time. If you get a rainy day of your own, wear shoes with some grip, walk around in it for hours and come back soaked and delighted, which is the only correct way to read this book.

Night Train to Lisbon

In Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon, a quiet Swiss teacher walks out of his classroom, and out of his whole careful life, and boards a train to Lisbon to learn about a Portuguese writer he never met. It’s a novel about the lives we didn’t live, and it’s the one that was actually in my bag.

That’s exactly how it feels to ride one of Lisbon’s old trams up a hill you don’t know, with no idea where you’ll get off. For a little while, you could be anybody, which is thrilling and a little terrifying, and I recommend it to everyone.

What I actually found in Lisbon

The Lisbon of the novels is quieter and lonelier than the Lisbon in the travel ads, which is mostly sunshine, rooftops and people laughing over sardines. That Lisbon exists, and it’s wonderful, but the literary Lisbon is a city for walking alone and thinking too much.

I found it on side streets early in the morning and in cafés where I was the only foreigner. I found it in the light on the river at the end of the day, when the whole city goes gold and then blue, which is the light I would tell anyone to wait for, with a book in their bag and nowhere else to be. And I found it in a secondhand bookshop, where I bought an old Portuguese edition of Pessoa even though I can’t read a word of it, which I think he would have understood.

A city you’ve read is never just one city. It’s the one you imagined and the one you find, overlapping.

How to plan a literary trip to Lisbon

Read Pessoa before you go, even if it’s only a few pages, because The Book of Disquiet is perfect for dipping in and out of. Bring Saramago for the rainy day, tuck Night Train to Lisbon in your bag like I did, and visit the Casa Fernando Pessoa, the house where he spent his final years, which is now a small museum. Most importantly, leave whole afternoons unplanned, because the Lisbon from the books only shows up when you aren’t rushing.

For the bookshops themselves, here’s my guide to the best bookshops in Lisbon. And if you love reading a book in the place where it’s set, I also wrote about the novels I pack for Italy and Scotland.

Looking for a homey hotel? Here are places to stay in Lisbon. (affiliate link)