Botafogo Bay, 1832
The light. It enters through the cracks of the wooden window and goes straight to my eyes. I am still wearing my frock coat and boots. I arrived late yesterday as I went to experience the Lundu in the lands near Glória beach. I try to move, but all I can manage are slow gestures, like a southern sea lion. Today of all days, when I arranged to meet a curious English navigator who claims to be mapping how life originated. He will be staying in a guest house at the bay while his ship, HMS Beagle, waits in the port. Curious this notion of explaining life, God’s good work, through successive attempts of nature. He says that one day he will publish these findings. Where will this lead?
Gomes Freire Street, 1902
But where were my manners 70 years ago? Allow me to introduce myself: I am the Wandering Carioca, and I have been recording my journeys through this city for a very long time. I have lived in various places and witnessed up close the commotion that is life here. Look now at the case of the Bota Abaixo that aims to reshape some of the streets of this city that fortune has directed me to call my own. Suddenly, all the colonial houses gave way to Art Nouveau facades, with their filigrees and foliage in bronze and soapstone. All of us wearing jackets in the tropics, sweating, simulating a Paris below the Equator. We even speak in a Francophilic manner. Sitting here at a bar table on Rua do Carmo, I’ve watched time rush past me, like one of the boys in the square selling coconut sweets. And as soon as the century moved forward, the contemporary made itself present. And that’s the only reason why it makes sense to retell passages from the diaries I’ve kept since then.
Flamengo Street, 1920
I must have drifted, for the light that now cuts through the shutters is no longer the same. The sea lions are gone, and with them Darwin’s voice, still echoing somewhere in my memory. I was waiting for Pixinguinha, but his return from the long journey had left him exhausted, and he had promised me only “later.”
So I walked alone through the slopes of Glória until I reached a sobrado whose windows spilled both music and argument into the street. Inside, the air was thick with smoke, a mixture of tobacco and kerosene lamps. At one end of the room, flutes and cavaquinhos tried to tame the night with choros that curled like arabesques in the air. At the other end, men in jackets gesticulated, their words more urgent than their manners.
Graça Aranha’s voice carried, lofty, defending a Brazil that must shed the mask of Europe. Ronald de Carvalho nodded, adding his own cadence, a diplomat’s precision dressed as poetry. Manuel Bandeira coughed softly, then let fall a verse so simple it seemed to hush even the flautist. Di Cavalcanti sketched distractedly on a scrap of paper, his lines quicker than their words, already rehearsing the colors of a new century.
I stayed in the corner, unnoticed, feeling time bend upon itself. Only a few nights ago—or was it nearly a hundred years?—I had listened to Lundu circles, forbidden yet alive. Now here I was, watching another forbidden thing take root: the idea that Brazilian art could break free from its gilded frame.
And all the while, in the background, a flute insisted on repeating a phrase. A phrase that would not resolve, as if waiting for Pixinguinha to arrive and bring it home.
Atlântica Avenue, 1941
Home. The word still lingers from that unfinished phrase on the flute, as if twenty years had passed in the span of a single breath. And here I am, on the seafront of Copacabana, watching couples stroll under the dim lamps of the promenade while the world beyond the horizon burns.
The hotel lobbies are full of uniforms, some German, some American, all sipping coffee as if this sand could remain neutral. Radios whisper victories of the Reich, and in the next block someone insists on playing Glenn Miller. The city itself is split: in one corner, toasts raised to Berlin; in another, to London.
I fear the future will demand more than allegiances spoken over champagne. What if tomorrow they call upon these young men I see laughing on the sidewalk? What if the same hands that today strum a guitar at the kiosk are forced to hold rifles in jungles and deserts far from here?
I walk slowly, coat pulled tight against a chill that is not from the sea breeze. The true cold comes from knowing that even this beach—this stage of leisure and lightness—cannot escape history’s grip. And I wonder: when the call arrives, will “home” still mean this strip of sand, or some trench half a world away?
But perhaps the true battlefield is not only across the ocean. Today, while the cafés still murmured of Berlin and London, I saw a new army arrive, carrying pencils and film reels instead of rifles. Walt Disney himself, escorted by men from the American embassy, wandered these same sidewalks. They spoke of goodwill, of fraternity, yet what they truly carried was a war of images.
Soon, parrots and gauchos will dance on foreign screens, painting us as curiosities in Technicolor. A charm offensive, they call it. A way to win the Americas without a single shot fired.
I watched them sketch, the sea breeze scattering their papers, and thought: is this not another kind of draft? Not of soldiers, but of stories. A conscription of imagination, in which whole peoples are enlisted without ever knowing they marched.
And I fear this too, for if today they draw our beaches and rhythms into cartoons, tomorrow who will draw our very thoughts?
Vieira Souto Avenue, 1959
The war has long since passed, though its echoes never truly left these shores. I walked through blackouts, rationing, news of fallen boys whose laughter I still remember from the kiosks of Copacabana. And yet, against all odds, life returned—first with a cautious whisper, then with the bold certainty of a chorus.
Now I find myself in Ipanema, not in grand halls nor embassies, but in the intimacy of apartments barely large enough to hold a piano and a dozen restless souls. Here the revolution is quiet: a guitar resting on someone’s knee, a voice barely above the murmur of the waves. João, Tom, Nara lean forward, almost whispering, as if afraid to disturb the air with too much volume.
It is the opposite of the wartime parades I once saw, the opposite of Disney’s Technicolor armies. This is a movement moving outward, from Brazil to the world, carried not by soldiers or propaganda, but by the softness of a chord, by the audacity of silence between notes.
I watch, astonished, as the Lundu I once danced a century ago finds its descendant here—refined, syncopated, disguised as novelty but ancient at its roots. And I realize: this too is a battle of narratives. Only now, the weapon is gentleness, the strategy is intimacy, and the victory lies in being heard.
From this window on Vieira Souto Avenue, I see not an army, but a wave. A bossa nova, rising quietly from these rooms to flood the world. And just as I turn to leave, I notice a tall girl walking past, all sun and stride. Curious, I ask her name. She smiles evasively, keeps walking, and only when she reaches the corner does she turn back, her voice carrying above the surf: Helô!
Summer of 1972, Ipanema Beach, Dunas do Barato
The quiet chords of bossa still echo in me, though muffled now, like a memory wrapped in cotton. I had left behind the window on Vieira Souto Avenue and descended into the sand, guided by a pull I could not resist. Something in the air was thicker here—smoke, salt, and a laughter that came from deep within the dunes.
The Pier stretched out into the sea like an unfinished thought, a steel arm rusting under the sun. But around it the dunes had risen, walls of sand that shielded us from the city. Inside this enclosure, another Rio pulsed—a Rio that mixed samba with rock, poetry with protest, and silence with the crackle of guitars.
I sat down, and before I knew it, I was breathing slower, softer, as if the air itself wanted me to drift. Perhaps I had “made my head,” as they say here, with what was passed around in careless hands. Perhaps it was simply the freedom of the moment.
In one corner, young men strummed sambas with the swing of malandragem. In another, barefoot girls sang Dylan, their Portuguese bending into English without apology. Gal’s voice floated above it all, raw and magnetic, while someone beat a surdo against the fading light.
I watched the collision: the tidy intimacy of bossa nova dissolving into this wide-open chorus, class and skin mixing without permission, everything tumbling together in the dunes. And I thought—this is another kind of modernism, born not in salons or apartments, but in sand, sweat, and smoke.
When the sun finally touched the horizon, the entire beach applauded. Not for a performance, but for the day itself. For being alive, for being here, for being free, if only for a breath.
Praça XI, 1988
I think of that summer at the Pier, smoke curling in the dunes, the sound of samba colliding with rock, barefoot poets applauding the sunset. I think of it now, as the drums of [KR1] Mangueira thunder down the avenue, closing their parade on the very first night of this new stage: the Sambódromo.
Around me, the air is electric. Sequins flash like sparks, banners ripple like waves, and the city—this city I have carried in me for more than a century—invents itself once again. Yet beneath the rhythm, my mind drifts back. From the quiet apartments of 1920, where Graça Aranha whispered of a Brazil to come. From the dunes of 1972, where freedom was improvised in sand and smoke. And now, here, Niemeyer has cast concrete into curves, monumental yet playful, echoing those same modernist dreams I first heard in a smoky sobrado.
This is how the Rio works its miracles: it takes what was forbidden and makes it spectacle, takes what was limitation and pours it into new waterfalls of creation. Even the street itself—once uncontrolled, uncontained—is now shaped into architecture, without losing its pulse.
I watch the bateria surge, row after row, and I know: this city does not erase. It transforms.
Interlude, 1988–2001
In the years that followed, I no longer wandered only through streets or beaches. I wandered through ideas. Through rehearsal rooms thick with sawdust, film sets hot with arc lamps, and small design studios where cigarette smoke curled above drafting tables. From the parades of Praça XI to the fading echoes of the dunes, I began to trace a different rhythm—not of drums or guitars, but of markets, studios, and the restless inventiveness of this city.
I came to understand that Rio’s true export was not coffee, nor steel, nor oil. It was imagination. It was the ability to turn scarcity into style, repression into laughter, asphalt into dance. Between 1988 and the turn of the new millennium, I devoted myself to deciphering this hidden current: the creative economy that pulsed beneath every samba beat, every film set, every banner on the street.
And as the century prepared to turn, I sensed another carnival approaching—this one digital, invisible, and perhaps even more unpredictable.
Voluntários da Pátria Avenue, 2001
The boardroom dissolved around me in a blur of glass and spreadsheets. The dot-com bubble had burst, and the air was thick with disbelief. Young men and women, who only yesterday spoke of “endless growth,” now folded contracts into their briefcases and whispered about severance.
I was there, a silent figure at the board, watching them drown in the very tide they once thought they controlled. Their anguish was raw, almost innocent. And I longed to tell them: “This too shall return.” That I had seen it in the rise and fall of coffee, in the collapse of rubber, in the carnival of currencies that Rio has always danced to. That every crash is only a prelude to another fever.
But my silence held. I could not reveal the breadth of my years, nor the patterns etched into my memory. To them, I was only another board member, another man in a suit. If I spoke of centuries, they would call me delirious.
So I stayed quiet, feeling the weight of their despair and the echo of my own restraint. Yet deep inside, I carried something else: hope. For I know this city, and I know its rhythm. Rio always reinvents itself. And I will be here when it does—ready to watch, once more, as the impossible turns into carnival.
Warehouse No. 5, Port Zone, 2025
The lights of the revived warehouses glow softly against the dawn sky. And I, having seen this city reborn so many times, smile with tears in my eyes—stirring memories that began long ago, in a room in 1832, and arrive here, opening doors of possibility.
Since the bursting of the digital bubble, Rio has reinvented itself. It became the stage for great creative events, transforming its natural vocation into a capital of celebrations. I remember Carnival, which, after the silence of the pandemic, returned like a thunderclap of color, exploding with more joy and diversity than ever before—street blocks twining through asphalt like veins of laughter, sambas rising with a renewed sense of community.
I think of Rock in Rio, and how, for four decades, it has shaken these hills with music from every corner of the world—a beacon of convergence where generations found themselves singing side by side. And I recall the free mega-concerts on the sand of Copacabana, when two million voices carried Madonna, Lady Gaga, and hope itself into the night sky.
In this rhythm, Rio was named World Book Capital for 2025 by UNESCO—an unprecedented recognition for a Portuguese-speaking city. To me, it was less a title and more a mirror of what I had always known: that words and stories are as much a heritage here as drums and guitars. I also wandered through the birth of the Rio Music Conference, the largest gathering of electronic music in Latin America, and the Rio Webfest, which grew into the largest festival of web series in the world—proof that innovation pulses even in the backstreets where no spotlight lingers.
And how could I forget the explosion of street art? Since 2009, when graffiti was no longer a crime, Rio became an urban canvas, each wall a diary of its own. In 2016, Kobra’s Etnias mural rose on the Olympic Boulevard—a face of many faces, colors translating the restless soul of the city into monumental scale.
Today, as I contemplate the silent transformation of these warehouses into creative hubs, I feel Darwin beside me—back then, curious about life’s metamorphoses. And I, an old acquaintance of the city, stand here moved by what we have lived.
Rio always reinvents itself. And I remain here, ready to see the next act—with hope, with emotion, and with the certainty that this city never ceases to reinvent itself, as if making art on the very edge of imagination.
And then I ask myself, after a journey like this, what should one do?
A cold chope on Rua do Ouvidor, of course.
New Rio, 2035
You know something I haven’t told you yet, in this hurried diary?
I am not writing from your present.
Today, I live in 2035—two hundred years after my first memories of light filtering through a wooden shutter in Botafogo. I have crossed centuries, masquerading as a witness, but here the mask dissolves.
The Rio before me is no longer merely human. Algorithms run through its veins like new rivers, drones cross the skies like seabirds, and the very stones of the city hum with data. Yet the soul remains—unpredictable, inventive, always ready to turn limits into waterfalls of creation.
I walk through a Rio that is post-human, but not absent of humanity. Children still play football on narrow streets, though their ball sometimes glows. Music still rises from windows, though the instruments may be virtual. And laughter—that laughter that once echoed in choros, in sambas, in bossas, in rock by the dunes—still bursts without warning, irrepressible as the tide.
Two hundred years, and I am still here. Watching, remembering, reinventing with the city. And perhaps that is the final secret: Rio is not a place, but a way of surviving time itself.