Casa Fernando Pessoa – First it’s strange, then it gets into you!

What does horoscopes and math calculations have to do with Fernando Pessoa? I’m in the right place? Is this the real place? Yes, you’re absolutely right, this is Casa Fernando Pessoa, which welcomes visitors with horoscopes of the various heteronyms of Fernando Pessoa. The poet invested big time in his more than 72 ​’avatars’ and everyone had their own experience with different personalities, different professions and personalized horoscopes depending on date of birth. Fernando Pessoa has even exchange letters between his ​most important ​​personas, as Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos and Alberto Caeiro.

If you are curious to know more about the life and work of Fernando Pessoa this is the right place to discover the less known sides of one of the greatest geniuses of Portuguese literature, which besides being a poet was an astrologer, journalist and even advertiser: in 1928, Fernando Pessoa wrote the Coca-Cola slogan in Portugal: “First, it is strange. Then it gets into you”. The result: Coca-Cola would be prohibited by the authorities for allegedly create addiction.

Born in Lisbon in June 1888, he died in November 1935 as a result of liver cirrhosis. Bohemian declared, he was a regular visitor of cafes and the city’s taverns. One day, he was photographed drinking a glass of wine in Abel Pereira da Fonseca, in downtown Lisbon, photo that he sent to his beloved Ophelia with the dedication: ‘caught in flagrant of liter’ (a words game he did for being caught in red handed drinking wine at working time). This is precisely the name of the cafeteria next door to Casa Fernando Pessoa and which you can visit during the Campo de Ourique food tour of the Taste of Lisbon. A very nice space, with a small garden outside, where you can enjoy casual meals as fried cod with baked beans and tomato rice. Like we do at our #28 Tram-Campo de Ourique Food & Cultural Tour .

Fernando Pessoa last sentence was written in English in the hospital bed, in November 29, 1935: ‘I know not what tomorrow will bring’.