February 27th 2026
(written in Italian, translated with the help of ChatGpt)
I went to Lisbon as a tourist, and yet I don’t like tourism.
Or rather: I don’t like myself when I’m being a tourist.
There is an inevitable cognitive dissonance that kicks in every time I get on a plane “just to go somewhere”, arrive in an anonymous short-term rental designed for speculation, and move through a city knowing that I am contributing — even with the best intentions in the world — to a process that is more or less slowly emptying it of inhabitants and of reality.
I know this process very well, because I was born and raised in the centre of Florence, which has been a tourist destination for as long as tourism has existed, and in the last few decades has been progressively devoured by it.
I know what it means to watch your own land become a scenic design, to see historical shops close down, rents skyrocket, civic relations thin out, and residents turn into a logistical nuisance for those who come “to enjoy it”.
Because of this, over the years I’ve learned to avoid tourism for its own sake in the same way I avoid food that I know is unhealthy and ethically dubious.
I travel a lot, yes — but almost always for work, for research, for missions that allow me to steal a few days and grant myself the pleasure of wandering around as a collateral consequence of the trip, not as its main purpose.
Otherwise I go where I have friends, couches, spare rooms and people willing to host me. The latter is becoming increasingly rare: I don’t know if it’s because of growing age, progressive embourgeoisement, children (for those who have them), soul-eating jobs, or some combination of all of the above.
Lisbon would never have occurred to me: I don’t speak Portuguese, I have no Portuguese friends, it’s part of neither my emotional circuits nor my professional ones. And on top of that, it has been subjected to one of the fastest and most ferocious processes of touristification of the last decade; if it hadn’t been for Aunt Thrix’s invitation, I wouldn’t have chosen it as a destination and this trip would never have existed.
But she suggested it, and it was hard to say no. At that point I was parked at my mother’s place, solitary and melancholic, waiting for a crucial answer from the European Union about the start of my Marie Curie project — one of those waits that keep your life in suspension and make you feel provisional even to yourself.
Curiosity and the need to escape the bubble won, and I bought the plane tickets before pessimism could make me change my mind.
Given the theme of this series, however, it seems only fair to say something about a question that keeps bouncing around the internet: is sustainable tourism possible?
In my honest opinion, the answer is: sort of.
You can be careful — travel off-season, avoid big chains, support small local businesses — but consuming a city in a week, having reached it by plane and staying in a short-term rental, remains structurally scarcely sustainable.
Every now and then, however, I think it’s important to allow ourselves to sin; otherwise ethics turns into self-flagellation and perfectionism, vices that cause more damage than a hailstorm.
Speaking of which – it was the weather that ended up punishing our little trip.
Travelling off-season has its advantages, but it’s always a gamble when it comes to the weather. In Bordeaux I was lucky; this time, not so much. Lisbon – famous for its light and its 300 days of sun a year, or so the guidebook claimed – welcomed us with almost incessant rain and more than one severe weather warning.
A damp and slippery baptism, dotted with sudden falls, sleepless nights, violent bugs, inflamed ankles and broken shoes (and yet, one must go on).
This is where this diary begins: with a trip I hadn’t imagined taking, done in the least ideal way possible, at the wrong moment, with the wrong weather, but with the right person — and which, for that very reason, turned out to be an unexpected laboratory and, in its own way, something quite beautiful.
We did really try to find accommodation that wasn’t openly predatory.
We looked for old hotels, long-standing guesthouses, “staying with locals” solutions — the way Airbnb worked in its first, now almost mythical incarnation. But the prices were such that they were simply out of reach, especially for a whole week. In the end we surrendered to the evidence of the market and took what we could afford.
A tiny ground-floor flat: little light, no living area, a windowless bathroom.
In a strategic position, though, just a short walk from the metro; in a neighbourhood — Largo Intendente — that friends living in Lisbon had described, with an affectionate euphemism, as a bit rough.
But Aunt Thrix comes from the back alleys of Genoa, and I’ve lived for a long time in those of Naples and Palermo: nothing that seemed particularly frightening to us. Rather, a familiar landscape, marked by visible forms of marginality and by a precarious balance — the kind of balance that touristification tends to shatter quickly and violently.
On the first day, helped by an unexpected break in the rain, the neighbourhood greeted us with a scene we immediately noted down as a good sign.
As soon as we stepped outside, we were stopped by a trans activist selling some self-published zines from her feminist collective: a few pages full of poems, drawings, political texts, which Thrix bought in bulk without batting an eyelid.
The area is clearly LGBTQ-friendly, but also in the middle of an accelerated process of gentrification. The most textbook example of this came a few days later, when I had dinner in an excellent, rather expensive vegan restaurant (O Gambuzino, perhaps the best vegan place I’ve ever tried!) just a few steps from our bnb — an experience that Thrix, more working-class than I am and less indulgent towards certain aesthetics, politely refused.
Outside this very refined place, on the doorstep, a few addicts were smoking crack.
A scene that summed up for me, with cruel precision, the essence of the early stages of gentrification: when the “pioneering” activities of new residents – even with the best intentions – speed up rising prices and the expulsion of those who were there before.
With Intendente and its contradictions as our starting point, the next day we began exploring the city.
We decided to start where it felt most honest to begin: with a refresher on Portuguese political history, by visiting the Museum of Resistance and Freedom, the Museu do Aljube. A refresher that, I realised — not without embarrassment — I needed more than I had thought: I knew shamefully little about the history of Portugal.
Reaching the museum on foot was already a first exercise in orientation: a walk around the hill of Alfama, the oldest neighbourhood in the city, between intermittent showers and slippery pavements – very slippery.
Lisbon’s pavements are made of small square river stones, similar to Roman cobblestones but smaller and smoother: an aesthetically pleasing choice which, in the rain, turns into a dangerous obstacle course. Poor Thrix had already tested this on her own skin on our very first evening, when she went down flat on her front in a nearby alleyway (we got quite a scare, but her knee held).
And so, cautiously skating up and down the slopes, we trudged our way from the city’s unresolved present towards its most uncomfortable past.
As I crossed the threshold of the museum, I felt a shadow settle on my shoulders.
It was not the result of any staged curatorial effect: it was the place itself that exerted an immediate sense of oppression.
The building dates back to the Moorish period, when Muslim dynasties ruled the Iberian Peninsula, including its westernmost region, Gharb al-Andalus. The museum, however, is dedicated to a darker and more recent history: for almost half a century — from 1926 to 1974 — it was used as a prison by the PIDE, the political police through which Salazar’s regime repressed all opposition with an iron fist.
This is not a museum one enters to lighten the heart. It is a visit that demands attention, and a certain willingness to be confronted by what one has forgotten — or perhaps never truly known.
I realised almost immediately how fragile my memory of Portuguese history was: how minimal and imprecise the notions I had learned at school or university had been — just enough to pass an exam and then forget; and how scarce references to Portugal are within the sources and information networks familiar to me.
I remembered that the country had lived through a long dictatorship, but I had lazily filed it away as “military”.
I had removed — if I had ever truly learned it — that António de Oliveira Salazar was not a general, but an academic. A professor of economics, to whom the military offered the Finance Ministry in 1928, entrusting him with the arduous task of restoring the country’s disastrous budget, which had never truly recovered from Brazil’s independence in 1822.
A task in which the Professor succeeded — albeit through draconian measures that combined the repression of all civil liberties with the brutal exploitation of the colonies; a formula that allowed him to become the architect and master of one of the longest-lasting authoritarian regimes in Europe.
I also remembered that Portugal had been the first European power to establish colonial outposts in Africa and the Indian Ocean (global modernity, in a sense, began with them), and the last to loosen its grip on its colonies. What I had forgotten — or perhaps never fully processed — was the near-perfect temporal coincidence between the end of the internal dictatorship and the end of the colonial empire, after Salazar’s death.
The two arms of power fell together, between 1974 and 1975 — and not by chance.
I had in mind a vague image of the so-called “Carnation Revolution”: a bloodless, gentle revolution, a rare example of a peaceful transition from fascism to democracy.
Walking through the museum’s corridors, and later speaking with those who truly knew local history, forced me to refocus this image as well.
Rather than a popular revolution, the “Carnation” movement was in fact a military coup — a putsch led by young officers who had developed their political consciousness during the colonial wars in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique, where the dictatorship had sent them to kill and be killed in its name.
Sent to fight increasingly bloody and increasingly unsustainable wars, these young “Captains of April” began to question not only the legitimacy of the empire, but the entire political structure that sustained it: that single apparatus of power which required violence, simultaneously, inside and outside national borders in order to survive.
Their march towards Lisbon was welcomed enthusiastically by the population; and from the red carnations that the florist Celeste Caeiro handed to the soldiers, the revolution took its name.
It was therefore, to a large extent, the colonial war that made the continuation of the dictatorship impossible. Or more precisely: it was the colonised peoples, through their struggle for liberation, who liberated the coloniser.
The colonisers, however, were careful neither to acknowledge nor to repay the favour: once independence was recognised, the Portuguese quietly left, taking money and expertise with them while their former colonies collapsed into civil war.
I left with a heavy head and a strong sense of frustration: not so much for what I had seen, but for how easily I had forgotten it.
In the following days I began looking for literature through which I might at least partially recover this forgotten history, only to encounter the evidence that in local bookshops the Anglophone bibliography scarcely touched on the history of colonialism at all.
Back home, I eventually opted for a book translated into Italian from Norwegian, The Navigators by Erika Fatland, which proved to be not only a splendid travel narrative but also an invaluable source of information and reflection — one I would recommend to anyone wishing to gain a broad overview of five centuries of Portuguese imperial history and geography.
The following day was the most unfortunate of the trip — and, ironically, the only one for which we had made plans in advance.
Thrix was keen to see some of the splendid palaces scattered across the hills of Sintra, especially the Palácio da Pena; and since it is one of the most tourist-saturated sites in all of Portugal, we agreed to book ahead, fearing endless queues and sold-outs.
I took responsibility for choosing the day, and it was not a fortunate choice.
We left early in the morning, deceived by a patch of sunshine, only to be slapped by Cyclone Ingrid almost at the exact moment we crossed the threshold of the Palácio da Pena.
A wall of water collapsed on us with methodical persistence, turning an experience already crowded with minor scams, bureaucratic rigidity, and compulsory routes into a kind of initiation rite for penitent tourists.
Perhaps in good weather, with the possibility of strolling through the romantic parks surrounding the palace, I would have appreciated more the eclectic, fairy-tale aesthetic of the place. Instead, under the torrential rain, I mostly felt a distinctly unspiritual irritation at the opulence of Portuguese monarchs, who used the profits of spices and empire to build dream residences while large parts of their population remained trapped in structural poverty.
Magnificence, under heavy rain, becomes less poetic and more accounting.
I must admit, however, that the Hall of Heraldry in the Royal Palace of Sintra left me literally open-mouthed: for once, excess did not irritate me but dazzled me. One of those rooms that alone justifies the climb, the cold, and the damp seeping into your bones.
To close the day in tragically memorable fashion, physiology intervened.
Poor Thrix — whose shoes had already begun to disintegrate from the relentless rain — was struck by a sudden bout of violent diarrhoea, heroically commuting between bed and toilet for hours, while I tossed in insomnia, torn between solidarity and the very concrete realisation that a windowless bathroom shared by two adults is an anthropological experiment I have no intention of repeating.
If the previous day at the Museu do Aljube had returned to me the weight of history, Sintra returned the far more immediate weight of the body — its pains and its odours. And in its own way, it was an equally effective lesson.
Around 9 a.m. I declared sleep officially lost and decided to go out.
I left Aunt Thrix resting in our miniature mansion — not without leaving her something dry to attempt eating — and made my way to Belém for an encounter with the ghosts of the Empire’s navigators.
One of those pilgrimages I prefer to undertake alone, and which she was not particularly interested in.
The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos — the Monastery of the Hieronymites — was commissioned by King Manuel I on the very site where Vasco da Gama withdrew in prayer, together with his men, before departing on the voyage that would lead them to India by rounding the Cape of Good Hope, in 1497.
It was with this journey that the Portuguese opened their route to the trade of the Indian Ocean, until then dominated by Arab merchants, disrupting existing economic balances on a global scale. In many cases, what tipped the scales in their favour was sheer brute force — the Portuguese imposed themselves by looting, burning, and bombarding anyone who stood in the way of their desire for domination.
Given that I was about to leave for my research period in South Africa, and that the formal confirmation from the European Union had arrived on my very first morning in Lisbon, walking toward the precise point from which the history of European colonialism had set sail felt spiritually intense; once inside the monastery, I decided I would stop and pray, to ask for protection for my journey.
The weather, for once, was gentle. The rain came in bursts, separated by long pauses and preceded by enough warning to allow me to take shelter. When I stepped into the cloister, the clouds opened briefly, and a ray of sunlight crossed the pale stone, heightening its beauty with almost excessive theatricality.
The magnificence of the place is undeniable, despite — or perhaps because of — its history. Thanks to the bad weather, there was almost no one there, and I entered without queuing. I was able to sit in the cloister in silence, without crowds to dodge, without crackling audioguides, without the anxiety of limited time.
So I allowed myself to pause for a while, to meditate, and to pray to Whom It May Concern to help me do good work. Something like this:
Here I am, my Lord: a twenty-first-century European researcher who would like to be anti-imperialist and yet is funded by the EU; asking for protection in a monastery that celebrates European imperial routes and was financed by their profits, while preparing to depart for one of the territories transformed and wounded by those very routes. Your will often leaves me puzzled, but what can I say: help me carry out properly the task You have assigned me.
When I stepped back outside, the rain had resumed discreetly. I took the road back to Intendente with the feeling — fragile but real — that the gesture, however contradictory, had been necessary.
In the following two days, I continued to see beautiful things.
On Saturday Thrix was feeling better, and two of her Genoese friends — transplanted to Lisbon a few years ago — took us across the Tagus, to less photographed places, and then back into the centre, for ginjinha in the square and cups of tea at Casa do Comum, a cultural centre with a bookshop I would gladly have dismantled and stuffed into my suitcase. It was an intelligent afternoon, full of conversations and lateral detours — the kind that makes you feel less like a tourist and more like someone temporarily adopted.
On Sunday we went to the Fundação Gulbenkian, another site with a layered and ambiguous history. Founded by an Armenian magnate who played a crucial role in launching Western oil exploitation in the Middle East, it now houses refined collections, including the exhibition Thrix’s friends had recommended, dedicated to the relations between Portugal and Brazil.
There, too, I underwent a brutal refresher.
Somehow, after years of reading Anglophone literature, I had forgotten that the principal traffickers in enslaved Africans across the Atlantic were, consistently, the Portuguese.
I had forgotten that Brazil imported the largest number of enslaved Africans: around five million between 1540 and 1860. For comparison, approximately four hundred thousand were deported to the United States.
I had forgotten that during those centuries the Portuguese word for the colour black entered English and other European languages to designate a new human category, indissolubly and irreversibly tied to slavery.
I learned that sharks altered their migratory routes to follow the slave ships, so many bodies were thrown into the sea.
I revisited the fact that Brazil was the last country in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery, and that today it has the second largest Black population in the world, after Nigeria.
I knew little to none of this. It irritated me to realise how much European public debate about racism and the legacy of the Atlantic slave trade — Italy included — is monopolised by the Anglo-American paradigm, while other histories, other tragedies, other legacies remain peripheral.
I left the Gulbenkian with my head full of data, images, connections.
And with a nervous system beginning to falter.
Because while I was accumulating history, my body continued not to rest. I slept badly; I struggled to fall asleep, or woke at dawn with a jolt in my chest. I walked too much. I thought too much. The rain did not help. The tiny bnb with its windowless bathroom did not help.
The sense of precariousness — professional, existential — seeped into everything.
At a certain point I found myself wrestling with a rather inelegant but very honest intrusive thought:
if one supposed week of vacation exhausts me like this, how can I possibly endure three years of research under the pressure of two academic supervisors and the European Union that funds it?
It is the kind of question that, if left to grow, becomes a vicious circle, because the brain is remarkably skilled at building castles of catastrophic predictions out of scrap material.
By Monday I was saturated.
After the Art Deco Museum — beautiful, truly, and yet enjoyed in a distracted way — I threw in the towel and declared defeat. I told my aunt I was going back to the bnb to rest and pack.
It was she — who is anything but a believer — who suggested I go and pray to Our Lady of Quietação in the small church of the Flemish nuns, a tiny jewel tucked beside the Art Deco Museum.
I obeyed without much debate — as we all know, sometimes prayers do come true.
After that silent pause, I decided to treat myself to an Ayurvedic massage in one of the many centres in Intendente, populated largely by Indian and Nepali practitioners. I went in saying that I didn’t feel I had any major bodily pain at the moment, but that I needed to calm my head.
The masseuse was silent, focused, precise. She began working along my legs, then stopped at my ankles.
That was when I realised something was wrong.
Despite my conviction that my body was fine, at the first pressure I felt a sharp, almost electric pain: I had a muscular blockage extending around both ankles, constricting veins and nerve sheaths. Something that slipping along Lisbon’s pavements had exacerbated, but that was clearly an older pain — as if I had been forcing my stride for a long time in a gait that was not my own.
My nervous hyper-reactivity, which I had attributed to thoughts, projects, precarity and empires, was not “only” in my head. It had a far more physical epicentre.
After the long and patient work of the masseuse, I returned to the bnb slightly unsteady, and at the same time strangely exorcised. Looking at me, my aunt remarked, not without irony:
“You see this Madonna of Quietação? Next time I see you getting nervous, I’m sending you straight for a massage and we won’t waste time.”
Which makes me wonder: wouldn’t it be beautiful if mental health centres paired the work of skilled physiotherapists with that of psychiatrists, who in most cases simply match symptoms to labels and the corresponding medications?
An idea that, I know well, is destined to remain fantasy in this Cartesian world where mind and body are perceived as separate and competing entities; but hope costs nothing — and sometimes, if you believe, prayers do come true.
Author’s note:
“(De)colonial Travel Diary” is an experiment in travel blogging with a deliberate goal: to take the decolonial method I was trained in outside academic writing and bring it into the exposed, imperfect terrain of personal narrative.
I am a historian, and the language I have learned to master is a specialist one. I created this blog precisely to write in public without the armour of academic prose and so-called “scientific” journals, consciously accepting the risks this entails.
This writing project is grounded in a simple conviction: all knowledge is situated, and for this reason decolonisation is neither a universal nor a replicable process. It shifts according to bodies, their historical trajectories, and the position from which we look at the world.
For someone like me — white, European, educated, and yet precarious — thinking decolonially is therefore first and foremost an exercise in white consciousness: an attempt to move through places and memories without claiming innocence, and without confusing critique with absolution.
I write in open solidarity with all those whom colonial modernity condemns to structural, inherited, and essentialised precarity.
Not to speak on behalf of, but to interrogate the place from which I speak.