Mariana

Saturday 28th May 1988

I joined Tom and Uli for breakfast at 08:00 hrs. The dining area was noisily occupied by a party of 15-year-old school children from Rio de Janeiro on a history trip.

After breakfast we went for a walk around the west of the town where there were yet more churches, plazas, orange tiled roofs and colourful houses on steep cobbled lanes.

It reminded me of Gold Hill, a steep cobblestone hill in the market town of Shaftesbury in Dorset that has a picture-perfect view of the countryside, and the 1973 Hovis bread advert.

The Hovis advert is called ‘Boy on a Bike’ and features a boy pushing his bike up Gold Hill for a bread delivery. After he delivers the bread, he freewheels back down the cobblestones to Dvorak’s New World Symphony! Although the advert was made some time ago, it’s continually voted as one of Britain’s favourite TV adverts of all time. Old people seemed accustomed to trudging up the steep hills with their shopping bags.

At 11:00 hrs. Uli and I walked to the Rodoviária de Ouro Preto with Tom who was moving on. The Rodoviária Bus Terminal was skilfully camouflaged underground, below well-kept lawns so as not to spoil the traditional old look of the town.

There were no direct buses to Brasília, so I bought a ticket to Belo Horizonte for 305 Cruzados for tomorrow. We said “goodbye” to Tom and caught the local bus to Mariana. Mariana is the oldest city in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. It is a tourist city, founded on July 16, 1696, and retains the characteristics of a baroque city, with its churches, buildings and museums. It was the first capital of Minas Gerais.

We arrived at a small town with central twin churches and more outlying churches. There were old colonial buildings much like Ouro Preto, but there were a lot of new ones as well. The streets from the twin churches to the central plaza had been decorated with coloured wood shavings to make patterns and crests. The houses along the route were hung with yellow garlands.

We had a beer in the town square and watched the preparations which were being made to welcome a new bishop to the town. During the afternoon church dignitaries from all over the area arrived, a wealth of Archbishops and priests.

People gathered excitedly around the twin baroque churches wearing their best clothes. There were children dressed as angels and others with placards welcoming the new clergyman Dom Luciano. The church bells rang, confetti rained down and cameras clicked as the archbishops arrived.

The top dogs seemed to wear black or red instead of the common white. After a short ceremony in the church to group moved down the decorated streets to the main square where there was a stage setup outside the cathedral with a crucifix and banks of loudspeakers.

The Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of Assumption (Portuguese: Catedral Metropolitana Basílica Nossa Senhora da Assunção) also called Caxias do Sul Cathedral It is a Catholic cathedral-basilica, the seat of the Archdiocese of Mariana.

A group of pointed bishops’ hats could be seen amongst the throng. Uli and I watched as they all went in for mass and then we caught the bus back to Ouro Preto. Here we had a pizza in the Praça Tiradentes and then went back to the guest house where we saw the Mariana religious festivities on the news on television.

I wrote my diary and then went out into the town, leaving Uli to sleep. In the town centre a crowd had gathered to watch a demonstration of Capoeira. Capoeira is an Afro-Brazilian martial art that combines elements of dance, acrobatics, and music. It was developed by enslaved Africans in Brazil at the beginning of the 16th century. It is known for its acrobatic and complex manoeuvres, often involving hands on the ground and inverted kicks.

Rhythmic tribal music was provided by drum, tambourine and berimbau, a single-string percussion instrument which looked like a decorated bow and arrow. Dancers (contestants?) went through fast non-contact Kung Fu motions with whirling kicks, blows and acrobatics.

I went to have a beer in a popular student bar before the film that I wanted to see at the cinema started at 22:30 hrs. There were students everywhere giving the town a festive atmosphere. I saw “Room with a View”, a 1985 British romance film directed by James Ivory with a screenplay written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and produced by Ismail Merchant, of E. M. Forster's novel of the same name (1908).

In 1907, a young Englishwoman, Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter), and her spinster cousin and chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett (Maggie Smith), stay at the Pensione Bertolini while on holiday in Florence. They are disappointed their rooms lack a view of the Arno as promised.

Set in England and Italy, it is about a young woman named Lucy Honeychurch in the final throes of the restrictive and repressed culture of Edwardian England, and her developing love for a free-spirited young man, George Emerson. The film closely follows the novel by use of chapter titles to distinguish thematic segments.

The town was still busy with drinkers, loiterers and lovers when I walked back to the Pousada Ciclo de Ouro where I was staying.