Suggestions
Visiting an unknown city in a limited time often leads to prepare or even simulate the journey ahead, relying on multiple devices: tourist guides with photos and addresses remarkable site bringing together fellow travelers opinions or a software to view streets.
These devices are also used during the trip as external memories: who did not meet tourists immersed in their guide rather than in the contemplation of the building in front of them, which has not observed travelers desperately seeking their way, their eyes popping from the mpa carefully held in their hands to the urban landscape surrounding them? To ease this tension, sometimes urban ecologies welcome maps for foreign visitors, especially near the places where they come in numbers.
In this Lisbonite old neighborhood, the map is a bit unusual as it is literally part of the wall in front of you, and consists of a well-known local specialty, a legacy of Moors, azulejos and their combinatorial beauty . If it embodies an Ariadne’s thread for the tourist, suggesting paths in the Alfama maze, it also reminds us that, sometimes, the territory is a map.