When the architect entered my home for the first time, to break it down completely and give it a well-deserved make-up, looking out the window he said a, something heavy, curious: “from this window, you see the most beautiful thing and the ugliest thing in Rio in the same panorama “.
I was a little shaken. On the Sugar Loaf and the Botafogo Bay we all agree, it’s easy. They are the most beautiful things in Rio (perhaps only the Christ can compete, but it is difficult to be so close, to be almost inside as in the bay). it is “the ugliest thing in Rio” that has puzzled me.
The palace of mirrors, the pink panettone that today is called Centro Empresarial Mourisco, but for me will remain forever “the Telefonica”.
True. Ugly. Horrendous, if you really look at it. However, he has always had an inexplicable charm on me. As if it were a wonderful child at birth, then grown up strangely ugly. And yesterday, finally, I opened Instagram and, voilà, here is the explanation to my thoughts.
In antiquity (100 years is an era, for the whole America) the Telefonica palace of mirrors was a marvel! O Pavilhão Mourisco da Praia de Botafogo, dramatically beautiful!
A Moorish marvel, in fact (and perhaps I finally understand also where the current name of the whole area comes from), inaugurated in 1910, with a restaurante and a tea room, and later, an infantil library.
What I see and love, every day I open my eyes there, is not an ugly panettone of mirrors! it is a sweet ghost of a marvel of the past that has left in Botafogo a little piece of its soul. Thanks @rioantigo, for making me understand! And thanks for these beautiful photos! (Photos taken from the Instagram profile of @rioantigo, a wonderful profile for us carioca de alma!)
