Casa Fernando Pessoa

Museum · Campo de OuriqueLisbon,Portugal

The last Lisbon flat of a poet who built other authors rather than pen names, with twelve hundred books marked in his own hand.

Casa Fernando Pessoa is the last flat of a poet who wrote as more than one person. Pessoa did not use pen names; he built authors, gave them biographies and let them contradict each other in print, and the museum devotes a whole floor to that company. Another floor is his own library: more than twelve hundred books, most of them marked up in his own hand. He moved into the first floor of number 16 in 1920, his eighteenth address in Lisbon, and stayed until days before his death in November 1935. He worked as a commercial translator, wrote in the evenings, and published almost nothing in book form in his lifetime; he was forty-seven when he died. What he left behind was a trunk of paper. Portuguese scholars have been sorting it and arguing over it ever since, and a good deal of what is now considered his best work came out of it.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Read something of his before you come — a few pages of The Book of Disquiet make sense of a plain flat, because what is on show here is writing, not furniture.
The building looks like every other one on the street — it is a normal apartment block in a residential quarter with only a small sign, so watch for the number rather than for a museum front.
He is buried a few streets away, not here — the flat is where he wrote; his remains were moved to the Jerónimos monastery in Belém in 1985, on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

Things to do

1
Read the notes he wrote in the margins
On the library floor, find a book left open at an annotated page. The handwriting is small and fast, in Portuguese or English, and it argues with the author. Pessoa read like this all his life, and these notes are the plainest record in the museum of what he actually thought.
2
Sit in the poetry library downstairs
The ground floor is a working poetry library, open without a ticket, with a reading room and a café. Half an hour there with a book is closer to what this house was actually for than walking round the exhibition upstairs, and hardly anyone does it.