Diario las Américas Newspaper, February 17, 1957, Page 23

thin, peakroofed houses that have led foreign and Brazilian observers to describe Recife — influenced more than any other place in Bra- zil by the bourgeois architecture of northern Europe — as “Flemish.” The Poco da Panela houses pre- serve the historic splendor of this old -section that used to edge the jungle; the home of the photogra- pher Benicio W. Dias, for instance, was inhabited for a while by the German painter Moser, who taugh so many Recife artists, and _be- fore him by the celebrated Ger- man lithographer Carls; the proper- ty of the doctor-writer José Carlos Cavalcanti Borges belonged to Eng- lishmen for more than a century and retains something of the flav- or of a European home in the tro- pics. Another, in the Monteiro sec- tion, has a decidedly Flemish touch in its. gable amd outside stairway. In Apipucos there is an old house, supposedly haunted, that has love- ly eighteenth-century tile murals brought from Portugal and insert- ed in its fort-like walls. It holds a relic of St. Francis Xavier, a portra- it of Dom Pedro II in his youth, some rare books, and characteristic Brazilian jacaranda and vinhatico furniture, some of it made by French and German cabinet-mak- ers who settled in Recife during the nineteenth century. An intriguing — and reputedly haunted — old house in the Pom- bal district that is now a factory used to belong to the Viscount of Suassuna and retains a relief sculp- ture of the nobleman’s coat-of-arms above the front door. (It is said that the old man used to bury his dead slaves in his own garden.) One of the early houses in the Sao Joao da Varzea section is. owned by the Brennand family who have ieft the sugar-cane industry to start a ceramics business, using the ex- cellent local clay; they have hired European technicians and _ their cwn distinguished painter Fran- cisce directs the artistic end of it. The tall structure of fine marble and woods in the Cruz das Almas district, which, like many homes of Apipucos, Madalena, and Mon- teiro, contains much Portuguese statuary, was built by a wealthy nineteenth-century .merchant, José Tasso. It is said that the unusual tower im the garden was built for his pet monkey, which later bit him fatally. If you are fond of old houses for simple sentimental or historic rea- sons, you must see the Cinderella like structure at the entrance to Estrada dos Remédios (Medicine Road), whereTeles Junior painted many of his oils; or the two-story house on Martins de Barros Docks, where Cicero Dias had his studio before he left Brazil for Paris; or the house on Rua da Imperatriz where the great Joaquim Nabuco is thought ot have been born; or another building, on Praca da In- dependencia, now occupied by the Diario da Pernambuco, the oldest newspaper in Latin America still in circulation. This house is linked to the death of the student Demécrito de Souza Filho, who was shot there on March 3, 1945, during a student protest against the “police” me- thods of the state government. Some of the best public buildings are the Pedro II Hospital, the State High School and the Jail built by Mamede Ferreira, a nineteenth- These gabled brick houses remind passers-by of the period of Dutch rule in Recife VENEZUELAN CATHOL “The Catholic chappel is of modern vaulted construction. After 20 years of hard work mix- ed with disappointments, the Sis- ters of St. Rose of Lima feel happy at the sight of the splendid new building completed year before last for their girl school in Cara- cas. They moved out of the old house south of Carabobo Park in July 1955, and moved into the brand new structure before it was finish- ed. Now they are teaching 400 girls from the ABC in kindergar- ten to pre-college subjects. Eng- lish, by the way, is taught from be- ginning to end of the entire course. century Pernambuco architect. edu- cated in France. The Government Palace, though well situated, is ex- pressionless, and the grandiosity of the Palace of Justice is typical of the arriviste style that appeared in Brazilian buildings between 1918 and 1930. One of ‘the many lovely towers in Recife crowns the Law School, which, incidentally, is one of the most distinguished schools of higher learning in Brazil. Some of its professors were famous men of letters, lawyers, social-science and philosophy scholars. It is hard- ly surprising, then, that the poem Prosopopéia, considered the start. ing point of Brazilian literature, was written in sixteenth-century Recife — by Bento Teixeira Pinto. Jewish literature in the Americas was born in Recife, which was a center of Sephardic Jewish culture in the seventeenth century. In fact the Sephardic Jews who settled three hundred years ago in New York — then New Amsterdam — came from Recife (see “Spain’s Wandering Jews,” July 1953 AME- RICAS). The Santa Isabel Theater, built by the Frenchman L. Vauthier during his stay in Recife from 1940 to 1846 as chief emgineer for the provincial public works, is a beau- tiful building of sober, classic lines. For a long time the center of the city’s operatic and dramatic events it attracted the white-tie and low- eut-gown set to hear such distin- guished figures as the poets Castro Alves and Tobias Barreto as well as singers and actresses. In this building, which is also linked to po- litical movements, the Brazilian statesman Joaquim Nabuco made many a fiery abolitionist speech. Recife now has a School of Ar- chitecture in the University, which Rector Joaquim Amazonas hopes Numerous bridges ‘span the canals and rivers of the “Brazilian Venice” one of the country’s oldest cities to house in a new set of buildings. Perhaps the city will thus acquire architects who will identify them- selves with the city’s extraordinary light, its past, its colors, and its waters. As a matter of fact, the scholars and artists brought in by the Dutch Count Mauritz of Nassau in the seventeenth century started in Brazil — perhaps in America — an almost modern type of city planning that extended beyond their tall, daring - architecture. Nassau also created the first tropic al botanical gardens in Recife. To- day the city has many gardens Beautiful old colonial residences River, are inhabited to this day. worthy of note for their tropical plants and landscaping. Some are the work of the iandscape-architect and painter Roberto Burle-Marx; others were planmed by the agro- nomist and _ landscape-architect Chaves Batista. Still others are plain suburban private gardens, recently selected by architect Os- car Niemeyer as the best adapted to a tropical city. : If you look for them, then, there are other Recifes than the one that presents itself to the casual travel- er. There is the one plundered in the sixteenth century by the Eng lish pirate James Lancaster, who took over the sugar mills and fore- ed the Portuguese to pull heavy carts; the one where Mauritz of aNs sau and his blond entourage built the first astronomical observatory in America, the first zoo, and two palaces by the river; the Recife of painters like Franz Post, scientists like Piso and Marcgraf, scholars like this one, by the Capiberibe Others are said to be haunted. like the Protestant minister Plante, the Catholic Fray Manoel do Sal- vador, and the Rabbi Aboab da Fonseca, who flourished in Nas- sau’s time; the Recife of the first Jewish cultural center in America, of the first political assembly; a city that, for some time, had the most heterogeneous population of the whole continent. IC SISTERS GET THEIR REWARD In this number are included 50 boarders — orphan girls sheltered and educated free of charge by the Sisters — until they are old enough to find employment or marry. In the new building as many as 2,000 girls may be accommodated at one time. Thousands -of Caracas girls have come out of the Sisters’ school with as fine an education as may be obtained anywhere, steeped in Christian principles and refined manners. The new building, rising on .a two-acre site, cost the Sisters 12,- 000,000 bolivares ($3.6 million), which they expect to pay out of the small fees charged to day stu- dents. Besides classrooms and dor- mitories, the main building con- tains a chapel, library, museum, seven laboratories, sewing room, lecture hall with a motion picture projector, a theater’ with 1,338 seats, professors meeting room, music study, another room for pia- no practice, cafeteria, and its own electric power plant. The sisters’ residence is located in a separate building. A swimming pool is yet to be built. Features of the institu- tion are a 25 piece girl band, and a missing persons service. The Sisters of St. Rose of Lima arrived in Venezuela in 1923, and founded a school for girls the same year. In 1935, their request of the year before, to establish a normal school, was granted by the Minis- General view of the school building for 2,000 gir try of Education, this being the very first private teachers’ school in Venezuela, SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1957 ce Le wae ‘MEMISPHERE BALHadAL on Seo Me es ww * Page 11 eo ee ae,