Lagos, St. Anthony and Pizza

The Igreja de Santo Antonio is a mind-boggling, gorgeous, gilded & tiled church.  It's part of the Museu de Lagos.   St. Anthony, born in Lisbon,  is best known for his patronage of seekers of lost articles.  The church, which was built in the 1700s and rebuilt after the 1755 earthquake, has paintings of the miraculous works that led to his canonization in 1232.

The museum, which was reopened after renovations in 2021, contains a collection of religious relics and various historical objects of the region; it also has a Cabinet of Curiosities, with some very exotic and weird items!    (The reglious items include painted tiles which quote Jesus as saying "I am ready for your whip."  More on that in a moment.) The museum was named for donor Dr Joseph Formosinho, who donated some, but not all of the objects within.  All of which is great, but the church, which you can only see by going through the museum, is just spectacular.

While it ended up being the highlight of the trip into Lagos, it wasn't the reason I wanted to go.  Lagos has a museum about the Portuguese role in enslaving Africans and transporting enslaved people to their colonies.  Since that is the ugly underside of the legacy of Henry the Navigator, whose single-minded pursuit of exploration resulted in Portugal leading the world for a time in trade, I was interested in learning more about it.

The Mercado de Escravos is on a site that is believed, in the 1400s, to be the first Western world market for the trade of enslaved Africans.   The curators have put together an exhibit of documents, objects, photos and artifacts that tell the story of how this history came about.  The museum is part of the UNESCO Slave Route program, which is aimed at making sure this story is told.  Yet...  to me it seems oddly truncated, as if this was a discreet moment in history and not something that informs Portuguese culture today.   And it doesn't address the contradiction between a religious culture and the enslavement of people (Portugal is not unique in this regard -- it's all very painful to contemplate).  That said, the establishment of the museum some 8 years ago was an important step in shedding light.

Lagos was very uncrowded (I hear it's very full of tourists, as the whole country is, in summer months) and the old town area was completely charming.   The streets are all tiled and many are closed to cars and full of cafes and shops.  I had a very nice walk around town.   It was easy enough to put a Lagos parking garage as my destination for the drive in, and the whole day made me feel very silly thinking it was going to be somehow hard.  

I headed to Sagres in the afternoon to try the pizza at Arte Bianca, #33 on the Time Out Best Pizzas in Europe list.  The pizza had sourdough crust, a cracker-thin bottom (they also have a more focaccia-like option) and was topped with anchovies and burrata made from the milk of cows nearby in Aljezur.  It was excellent!!  I would have liked to try more of their pizzas.  Now I have to try the 49 other pizzas to really know what to make of this list!  Two others on the list are in Copenhagen, so I may just knock that number down to 47 if I get to those pizzerias in the next week.