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Coimbra We didn't need to prepare ourselves much. We rode the commuter train from Sao Bento out to Porto Campanho, where the snazzy red-and-white high-speed Alfa Pendicular train begins its 220 kilometer-per-hour run to Lisboa.

Portugal, as Europe's designated poorest nation (before eastern Europe called attention to itself by a little genocide and general bad behavior) has been the recipient of EU largess, principally for the development of infrastructure – potable water, highways, and modernization of the railroad. The Alfa streaks along new welded roadbed through the gentle hills and valleys from Porto, Portugal's second city, past Coimbra, its intellectual capital, to Lisboa, its commercial and political center.

Coimbra from across the river, university on top

We got off in Coimbra's high-speed station and rattled into the center of town on a commuter train, then dragged our bags two short blocks to the Hotel Astoria where we set ourselves up in 1950s splendor. The trip only took an hour and fifteen minutes, so we'd shed our bags and were ready to wander a bit before lunch. We had another disappointing meal in a sidewalk café in the town square – careful, "scallops" in Portuguese may be veal scallopini – then wandered a bit more until the heat sent us scrambling for our lovely air-conditioned rooms.

Chad went out on an expedition to find ... guess what! the nearest, cheapest internet cafι. In the late afternoon, Rochelle, Sienna, and I clambered up the steep pedestrianized streets – hard to imagine cars EVER drove here – to the university on top of Coimbra's hill. Self-proclaimed as the second oldest university in Europe (after Bologna) it is a gem. Having ridden Portugal's fortunes since the 13th Century, it's an institution that's seen a lot. By 1709, when its oldest surviving buildings were built, there had been 43 Reitors (rectors, a quasi-religious title equivalent to President), all of whom are honored by portraits in the Private Examination Hall. Except for the first one, it looked like to us like a stiff-necked lot of clerics.

Coimbra's "Old Church" partway up the hill

the back of the Old Church	pillar detail on Old Church
The University's Iron Gate	At the top of the hill, we passed through the Iron Gate, and entered the university precincts, around which are the Joanina Library, Chapel, and the Rectory Building. We got tickets and visited the famous Jaoanina Library (named for the King, Jaoa V), a tall and stately mortuary for old books with gilded spines amongst gilded columns and scrollwork, presided over by a courtly old custodian who's been opening the door then closing it for throngs of tourists for a long time. Like the Long Library at Blenheim and the old library at Trinity, these impressive old rooms aren't used for anything but dazzling visitors with the institution's antiquity. And they do that SO well! We were utterly dazzled.
the line to enter the Jaoanina Library
This library was built at the height of Portugal's colonial powers using gold and precious woods from around the world, but mostly from Brasil. It is now lovingly watched over by a sweet old man who lets people in eight at a time to be dazzled.

By dinner time, which comes late in Portugal as in Spain, we'd found what looked like an adequate, if not stellar, restaurant, and settled down for one more round of "guess that entrιe." The english translations, where present, aren't always helpful. Sometimes they're literal translations; sometimes they just repeat the original words in an anglicized spelling; sometimes they're just outrageous. At a nearby restaurant we found "Grilled prick" prominently advertised – a local delicacy, or a favorite with visiting Brits, we couldn't tell which. With the indispensible help of an English-speaking waitress, we did quite well. Afterwards, worn out by the heat and hill-climbing, and Rochelle and me definitely suffering from respiratory problems caused by pollution, cigarette smoke allergies, and, undoubtedly, a few too many glasses of port wine in Porto on Tuesday, we were all happy to return to our rooms.

stone sculpture by Machado de Castro Again we were dazzled by this small museum's magnificent presentation, the superb lighting ...and, not least by the fact that we were able to move from object to treasure without being part of a mob. For us, this museum was much more impressive than the Louvre.	The next day we three explored Coimbra further, visiting the Machado de Castro Museum in the old bishop's palace, a gemlike little museum displaying a few works of the 16th Century Portuguese sculptor and art theorist who gave the museum its name, along with a small but fascinating collection of sacred objects taken from monasteries when they were dissolved. In the basement, we explored the catacombs, originally the basement under the Roman forum, with its collection of plug-and-play statues constructed so that the heads of out-of-favor politicians could be popped off and replaced with the new guys. I guess the Romans were practical guys. the Catacombs beneath the Museum
ceiling detail One measure of maturity is the number of recyclings a building has been through ...and the degree of care exercised in preserving previous excellences. This place gets the highest marks.	wooden sculpture by Machado de Castro
Museum arcade	From the museum's outdoor arcade, the city is laid out below in a chaos of tiled roof tops and fascinating avenues leading down to the river in the distance. Above, the University is at left, and the dome of the old church is visible to Sienna's left. At left, in the left foreground of the picture of the museum's double arcade, piles of stones await employment in the ongoing reconstruction effort.

I've already mentioned the way that Coimbra University has ridden the crests and troughs of Portuguese history. The dismemberment of the religious orders that increasingly dominated Portuguese life until the middle of the 18th Century happened to coincide with a memorable earthquake that leveled most of Lisboa in 1755. An enlightened rationalist, the Marqués of Pombal, who had lately been Portugal's British Ambassador, came home and took the reins, and his shadow is a long one, still evident throughout Portugal. The opportunity was perfect: Portugal was at the top of its colonial game, with slaves and ivory coming in from Africa and going out to the Americas, rare woods and gold coming in from Brasil then going out to the far east to buy spices and more slaves. The people were tired of an increasingly repressive and wealthy church. Pombal found it convenient to misdirect the wrath of the burgeoning poor and emerging middle class at these fat-cat churchmen instead of the nobility. Pombal brought enlightenment to the University, restructuring it along "modern" lines, substituting a science faculty for the no-longer-necessary theological college, for example.

Examination Hall

After the museum, we explored the rest of the university, enjoying the "new" buildings built under Pombal's leadership, including the two great rooms, the "Halberdiers' Room" used for public examinations and conclaves, and the Private Meeting Room graced, as already mentioned, with the portraits of the Reitors. An educational institution of long standing like Coimbra, Oxford, or even Harvard, generates for me an energy field that is intriguing and inspiring.

Like the worn stairway down from the Great Hall at Christ Church College, here at Coimbra I could easily imagine that centuries of students in the process of attaining understanding and wisdom walked this grand stairway, passed through this iron gate, and sweated bullets under the stern mastership of inquisitors who had themselves walked, passed, and sweated in their turn. As a builder, I appreciate the enduring grandness of these rooms, given the simple materials available to the builders -- stone, short timbers, natural pigments.

Private Meeting Room

organ in the university chapel

For me, this long and honorable tradition of the search for humanity is the crux of the European gift that is accessible today. It excuses generations of slavery, exploitation, and arrogance so long as its present manifestation and awareness attends to the equality of all humans as well as the sanctity of all life. At the risk of being preachy, Portugal gets high regard from me for the honorable preservation of the intellectual environment and the long-term encouragement of the life of the mind. And for whatever reason, at least in the hinterlands, nature is more intact here, and wildness closer to the surface, than elsewhere we've visited so far in Europe.

The streams are clearer, and the works of man fit into the natural flow more comfortably, than in England or France. The graffiti on the college walls – lots of graffiti here and in Spain, and much of it in English, for some reason – indicates a surprisingly global awareness of issue I consider important: globalization, human equality, preservation of diversity.

tiles on the chapel walls

Of course we saw comments about East Timor, one of Portugal's most regrettable recent national embarrasments, but also about Chiapas and women's rights in fundamentalist moslem countries. And yet I suspect that these may be thin, student enthusiasms that will quickly and conveniently vanish as the graffiti artists finish college and join their father's firms in striving to assert Portugal's place in the European Union. What makes me harbor such pessimistic suspicions? Although we were unable to interview any graffitists, we saw many, many students – chicly dressed, arrogant carriage, a breed consciously and habitually above and apart. To oversimplify, there seem to be two distinct races of Portuguese: a strong-faced, long-boned, creamy olive-skinned race of leaders, entrepreneurs, and employers, and a more numerous, even here in Coimbra, smaller, darker, less strikingly beautiful race of workers. At our second dinner in Coimbra we chose a favorite college haunt most of the way up the mountain that offers fado at the end of the evening meal. Fado – the word means "fate" – fills the same spot in Portuguese music that the blues occupies in American music. As practiced after a pleasant dinner in Coimbra, two guitarists, one exceptionally gifted on the twelve stringed Portuguese guitar, what we might recognize as a large mandolin, and a black-caped, bearded little fellow with a big, strong voice, play mournfully melodic music that I imagine would be heartbreaking if you understood the words. Not "my woman left me" heartbreaking, but the real sorrows of real life in a subsistence culture. Unfortunately for us, a party of ten upper class Portuguese – two chain-smoking beauties and eight self-consciously arrogant men – sat down to dinner about the time the fado started, and pointedly ignored the fado players, refusing to clap after songs, and even complaining amongst themselves that the singing interfered with their gabbling. By the sheer force of their disapproval, they caused the fado players to concentrate their performance in the restaurant's other rooms. I could hardly blame the artists for leaving, but I resented the insensitive "intellectuals" for being disrespectful of a national art form, especially as their selfishness interfered with our experience. Sienna correctly observes, "It is their country" but it's also the fado artists' country, and the upper-crust arrogance does obstruct their livelihood. Perhaps one of the most poignant lessons of travel is that the thought "if I were running things, this would be different" is as meaningless as smoke in the wind.

tile picture from a univerity hallway

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