In Lisbon, a Carpet of Stone Beneath Their Feet
A
calçada, or patterned pavement, of the fado singer Amália Rodrigues was
a collaboration between the artist Alexandre Manuel Dias Farto and
master pavers, including Jorge Duarte. It is in the Alfama section of
Lisbon.
CreditRodrigo Cardoso for The New York Times
LISBON
— As Portugal lost its colonies around the globe, the country’s nearly
six centuries of influence ensured a legacy of distinctive decorative
style: delicate filigree jewelry, colorful azulejo tiles, intricate
wrought iron work and black-and-white patterned stone sidewalks and
praças, or plazas.
Those limestone
surfaces are pedestrian objects in more ways than one: made to be
trampled on, day in and day out, in places like Macau and Rio de
Janeiro. “They are a carpet that people don’t always notice,” said Luísa
Dornellas, director of the Escolas de Jardinagem e Calceteiros, the
schools of gardeners and stone pavers.
But
in Lisbon, the heart of Portuguese culture, the pavements are
considered works of art. Since the City Council established the paving
school in 1986, it has trained 224 calceteiros, or pavers, to maintain
the limestone surfaces in the city as well as create new ones.
The
school also provides another benefit: It has codified the technique and
archived its history. Stone paving had been a skill handed from
generation to generation, taught “through oral tradition. Nothing was
written down,” said Ana Baptista, a staff member who handles public
relations for the school. “We want to preserve these skills.”
Patterned
pavements are as much a part of Portugal’s heritage as an after-dinner
glass of port. The school’s information sheet says that, in 1842, the
first patterned calçada, or pavement, was laid by a group of prisoners
under the direction of Lt. Gen. Eusébio Cândido Cordeiro Furtado at the
Castelo de São Jorge, the Moorish castle overlooking the city. The
paving no longer exists but, at the time its black and white zigzag
motif was a big hit. “The people of Lisbon enjoyed so much the
pavement,” Ms. Dornellas said, that soon after much of the central Praça
de Dom Pedro IV, commonly known as the Praça do Rossio, was paved in
waves (about 64,600 square feet of the paving still delights residents
and tourists).
Part
of Lisbon’s central Praça de Dom Pedro IV, commonly known as the Praça
do Rossio, was paved in waves of black and white limestone. The pattern
is often used, a reference to Portugal’s maritime heritage.
Within
years, many of the city sidewalks and plazas, as well as those in its
colonies, were carpeted in small pieces of limestone, some laid in
patterns but others just in white stone.
It
took manpower. “Up until the 1990s there were 400 pavers” in Lisbon,
Ms. Dornellas said. Then, as concrete and asphalt began to replace
stone, the number dwindled to just a handful.
The
creation of the paving school reflected the city’s concern for the
artistic heritage, but it also provided hope of jobs in an era of high
unemployment in Portugal. Ms. Dornellas, describing the school’s
history, told a success story of a man in his 50s, out of work, who
studied at the school and then last year set up his own thriving paving
business. Other graduates are hired by the city to maintain the public
calçadas, which today continue to decorate much of the city; the school
also has had trainees in many other countries.
It
can take 18 months to complete the school’s course of study and receive
a certificate marking graduates as professional stone pavers. “We now
have about 20 students each year,” Ms. Donellas said, and they
invariably are men: “We did have two women, but one dropped out.”
Jorge
Duarte, a master paver and teacher, with Luísa Dornellas, the director
of the schools of gardeners and stone pavers in Lisbon.
CreditRodrigo Cardoso for The New York Times
The
work is physically demanding. Jorge Duarte, the school’s master paver
and trainer (in Portuguese, mestre calceteiro e formador da escola de
calceteiros) demonstrated how it is done.
Outside
the school walls, blazingly white in the strong Portuguese sun, Mr.
Duarte had been working on a perfectly flat area of about 22 square feet
that had been prepared for paving. A kind of stencil, which the school
and its students call a mold, lay on the ground. It was in the shape of a
butterfly, about three feet wide; its exterior edges were lined with
limestone pieces and then the mold removed so the empty spaces could be
filled with stone of a different color.
The
students create molds from sheets of laminate-like material; “they are
used a few times and discarded,” Ms. Baptista said. Molds used on public
projects, however, are made of wood or metal, which can be used
repeatedly. The molds are archived, and the city has stored more than
7,000 in a warehouse.
When
it comes to the patterns that can be created, a paver’s imagination is
the only limit. One of the most common is waves, which pay homage to
Portugal’s maritime past: “our Golden Age in the 15th and 16th
centuries,” Ms. Dornellas said. Ships and dolphins abound, as do
references to nature — birds, stars, sunflowers — and motifs such as
rosettes and the cross of Christ.
After
surrounding the butterfly mold with white stones, Mr. Duarte lifted the
mold and began filling in the empty spaces with black stones. Each
stone was a little less than a couple of inches in size, and he had
chipped each and every one on all sides to fit precisely.
Mr.
Duarte at work on a new design at the school of stone pavers. Using a
mold of a butterfly, he fits a piece of limestone into place.
CreditRodrigo Cardoso for The New York Times
Machines
can do that work but Mr. Duarte prefers to prepare the stones himself.
“Some master pavers like to feel the stone,” Ms. Baptista explained.
“The creativity flows from the head into the arm and the hand that
breaks the stone.” So Mr. Duarte sat on his low stool — every
calceteiros has his own — and went to work with a small hammer. Its
metal head is sharp on one end, to chip the stone, and flat on the
other, to tamp it down, once in place, tightly against its neighbor.
For
the school’s work, the stones arrive from quarries as small pieces (in
earlier years, Ms. Dornellas said, it used to arrive in huge chunks).
White and black stones, the most popular colors, along with the less
common gray, are from the Serras de Aire e Candeeiros region of central
Portugal. The rare yellow and pink are mostly quarried in the southern
Alentejo region.
The small stones
create a mosaic, with plenty of cracks, or seams, that allow drainage
when it rains. “And they are elastic,” Ms. Baptista said, able to shift
and adjust when, say, a tree root grows underneath
Once
Mr. Duarte had all the stones in place, he picked up a heavy wooden
maço, which looks like a small butter churn and can weigh as much as 45
pounds, and pounded them until they were level. Then, using a shovel, he
dug into a mound of limestone that had been pulverized in the chipping
process, deposited it on the pavement, swept it into the cracks with a
broom, and then watered it to create what, once it dried, would be a
porous mortar.
The smaller the
stones, and the more complicated the pattern, the longer the work takes;
for plain pavements, an artisan can create almost 110 square feet a
day, Ms. Dornellas said. But if the pattern is more elaborate, only
about 10 square feet a day is possible.
A student made a peace symbol.
CreditRodrigo Cardoso for The New York Times
Mr. Duarte signs his work with hearts.CreditRodrigo Cardoso for The New York Times
A student work shows the symbol of the paving school.CreditRodrigo Cardoso for The New York Times
Somewhere
in every pavement is the paver’s signature mark; Mr. Duarte’s is a
heart. Several feet from his current project was a section of pavement
with a stylized black spider design recently laid by three young men
from Latvia under Mr. Duarte’s tutelage. At its center was his mark, a
cluster of hearts. And on this particular day, with his hammer in one
hand and chunk of limestone in the other, he swiftly chipped the piece
into the shape of a heart and handed it, as a memento, to a visitor.
Portuguese
calçada can be found “all across the world, in Rio, Angola, Macau,
Mozambique,” Ms. Dornellas said. The United States has some examples,
perhaps most notably in the John Lennon memorial in Central Park in New
York.
The school’s staff members,
including Isabel Polonia, coordinator of the paving students’ studies,
are eager to keep paving relevant in a modern world, and artists have
been called upon to create new designs. For example, the street artist
Alexandre Manuel Dias Farto, whose tag name is Vhils, created one in
2015 in the Alfama, Lisbon’s old town, to commemorate the fado singer
Amália Rodrigues, who died in 1999.
“The
pavement starts on the ground and climbs a wall,” Ms. Baptista said.
“When it rains it’s like she’s crying, recreating the emotion of fado.”
In
central Lisbon, a monument featuring two bronze statues by Sérgio
Stichini pay tribute to the city pavers. This figure shows the work of
chipping a piece of limestone.
CreditRodrigo Cardoso for The New York Time
There
even is a city monument to the pavers: Two bronze figures, one crouched
and chipping at a stone in his hand, the other using a maço to tamp the
surface. The statues, created by Sérgio Stichini in 2006, used to be
tucked away on a side street, but in 2017 they were moved
to a more prominent place, next to the grand Hotel Avenida Palace in
the central Praça dos Restauradores. A plaque at the site reads:
“Tribute from the city of Lisbon to the Pavers who build the ground we
tread.”
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