The youthful feuilletons of Jornal do Porto, written between 1859 and 1868, are still artificial and not very expressive when compared with texts from his more mature phase, such as the preface he wrote for the monumental edition of Amor de Perdição. But it was in Lisbon, far from his native city and matured by the experience of Farpas, that Ramalho achieved the traits of rigor, color and elegance that became so characteristic of his style.
This stylistic evolution was not accidental. The move to Lisbon in 1868, the association with Eça de Queirós and the circle of the Casino Conferences, the monthly publication of Farpas — all contributed to freeing Ramalho from the colorless prose of his early days. But it was above all distance — temporal and spatial — that allowed him to transfigure his memories of Porto into art.
The city that Ramalho describes in his mature works is no longer the city that the young feuilletonist saw daily, but rather a city recreated by nostalgia, illuminated by imagination and fixed in prose of acute plastic perfection.
One need only read the description of the inauguration of the D. Maria Pia Bridge, in volume XV of Farpas, to understand the scope of this stylistic transformation:
A delightful autumn day, with a broad milky and cerulean tone like that of a blue pearl, lovingly embraced nature and bathed the landscape in a vaporous light impregnated with the freshness of dew and the aroma of violets.
As Farpas XV
The city appears here as an almost impressionist vision:
We saw the smiling hill of Vilar, covered with greenery and crowned by the Crystal Palace, the treetops of the woods of Candal and Vale de Amores; the Ribeira quay with its blackened arcade and its picturesque market of old sun-polished canopied stalls.
As Farpas XV
Where each building gains its own personality:
(...) some well upright, stiff, glassy, gleaming, lined with faience, others potbellied, somber, stained, digging in their heels so as not to stagger like taciturn drunkards; still others, painted white, painted blue, painted pink (...) joyful, satisfied with themselves, laughing through open balconies adorned with carnations and rosemary.
As Farpas XV
Realistic detail
As a chronicler of nineteenth-century Porto, Ramalho Ortigão remains irreplaceable. No other writer left us such a complete and multifaceted portrait of the city in that crucial period of transformation.
In his pages we find the great public ceremonies and political events of Porto, but also the insignificant details that constitute the true substance of daily life: the hammering of tinsmiths in Bainharia, the smell of wine cellar in Reboleira, the hounds asleep in Rua das Hortas, the sound of donkeys' horseshoes climbing Rua do Almada on Saturdays. It is this attention to concrete detail, united with the capacity for panoramic synthesis, that makes Ramalho a master of Portuguese descriptive prose.
In defense of heritage
The contemporaneity of Ramalho Ortigão's gaze surprises those who read him today. His concerns with heritage defense anticipated by decades the heritage conservation movements of the twentieth century. His criticism of the destruction of medieval arches, the demolition of old streets, the replacement of traditional housing with banal constructions, still resonates today in contemporary urban debates.
His lament for the loss of cultural identity, the disappearance of local customs, cosmopolitan uniformization, echoes current concerns in the face of globalization. And his vision of Foz do Douro — that tension between fishing authenticity and bourgeois suburb — anticipated phenomena that twentieth-century mass tourism would make universal.
Literary archaeology
For the traveler who today traverses Porto, Ramalho Ortigão's texts offer a unique experience: the possibility of seeing the city in temporal depth, of understanding what subsists and what has disappeared, of recognizing beneath modern transformations the features of the nineteenth-century city.
Walking through Ribeira or climbing the stairs that lead to the Cathedral becomes an exercise in literary archaeology when one knows Ramalho's descriptions. And even the most transformed areas — the urbanized Foz, the widened streets of the center — gain historical thickness when we confront them with the writer's evocations.
A Porto of contradictions
Reading Ramalho Ortigão is, after all, a privileged way of knowing Porto. Certainly not the tourist Porto of panoramas and classified monuments, but the lived Porto, the Porto of tensions between tradition and progress, the Porto of contradictions between provincialism and cosmopolitanism.
It is also a way of understanding how literature can transfigure reality, how personal memory can convert into collective memory, how distance can transform the banal into the poetic. Ramalho Ortigão's Porto is simultaneously a real city, documented with almost sociological rigor, and an imaginary city, recreated by art.
It is in this double condition — as historical document and work of art — that the value of his texts about the city that saw him born and that he, by writing about it, helped to immortalize resides.