Dowdy old Lisbon is finally coming alive, said Seth Sherwood in The New York Times. Known for its faded colonial-era charms, cable cars, and inexpensive seafood, Portugal’s capital city has emerged from the geographic, cultural, and economic margins of Western Europe to become its newest showpiece. “Avidly making up for lost time,” a rising generation of artists in all fields—theater, art, music, dance—is creating an edgy new metropolis “amid the time-worn monuments and quaint cobbled lanes.”
In the city’s Belém district sits the magnificent Mosteiro dos Jerónimos, a 16th-century Gothic monastery that flourished at the height of the Portuguese empire. But right across the street is Lisbon’s “boldest 21st-century bid to recapture some cultural prominence,” the year-old Berardo Collection Museum. Here you can see paintings by Francis Bacon; Salvador Dalí’s whimsical White Aphrodisiac Telephone, topped with a lobster; and Paula Rego’s hallucinatory The Barn, which depicts “two young girls gleefully whipping the exposed backside of a milkmaid.” The museum is also packed with works by such contemporary masters as Richard Serra and Nan Goldin. Closer to the center of town is the “emerging design district” of Santos, filled with galleries and shops. At Storytailors, a renovated 18th-century warehouse, trendily dressed customers resembling “coy Lolitas and escapees from the pages of Wuthering Heights” browse through a wide selection of hoop skirts, corsets, and richly patterned lace undergarments.
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