Centrum, nightlife Rio

Sunday March 23, 2013

We gathered at four and headed downtown to see the old section of town near the port.  To do so we had to go through one of the 40 tunnels in Rio that makes it easier to communicate with the separate sections.  Squeezed between the mountains and the sea, Rio has great beauty but its traffic is adversely affected by the geography and it would impossible without the tunnels.

In the early 1900s Rio was prospering and the mayor at the time Pere Ira Passos aspired to make Rio as beautiful as Baron Haussmann made Paris.  He inaugurated a building boom that saw the construction of a beautiful opera house

a city hall, a city library and many other buildings.  The library is the largest in Latin America and has the third largest collection in the world.

Different parts of Rio have walkways with different tile mosaic patterns.  Roberto Brule Marx created these and each has its own distinctive pattern.  Copacabana has its pattern as does Ipanema and also Lapa

After walking around downtown we went to the Escadaria Selaron.  Jorge Selaron was a Chilean artist who came to Rio many years ago.  He began to transform the 215 steps of the Convent of Santa Teresa in the Lapa district of Rio by placing colorful tiles on them as a “tribute to the Brazilian people”. He died in January of 2013 of an apparent suicide.  Here is a view of the steps.

As the work began to become known, people would send or bring him tiles from all over the world to work in to his mosaic.

After our tour of Lapa we went to an opening of a new art museum, Casa Daros, dedicated to Latin American contemporary art.  The exhibition was part of the Daros Latin American Collection of the Daros Latinamerica based in Zurich Switzerland.   What we saw was eclectic ranging from whimsical representations of cartoon characters done as pre Columbian art to photographs created by children using homemade pinhole cameras.

From there we went to dinner at Nova Capela a traditional restaurant that has been in Lapa for 110 years.  Its durability is interesting because there was a time when Lapa was very dangerous to visit.  Now it is a thriving nightlife district.  Its portions are very generous and each couple shared an entrée and was still unable to eat the entire serving.  Following dinner we walked around Lapa a little and wound up at Scenarium a multi-story nightclub at night and an antique market by day.  It is huge and the line outside waiting to get in was endless.  Dom had sent our local guide Walter ahead to snare a table and we were able to by-pass the line.  We had drinks, wandered around and left before the place became packed with partiers.