São Paulo seen by Jean-Paul Delfino

With its twelve million inhabitants, São Paolo is the largest city in the southern hemisphere. It is also, so to speak, the largest foreign Italian capital with six million nationals whereas Milano counts only four. It is the tenth most expensive town in the world and is the economic capital of Latin America. Thus it remains undoubtedly a town the features of which are beyond measure. Founded in 1554 by Portuguese Jesuits, São Paolo has no reason to envy other megacities such as New York or Shangai, and hoards among its roads cut at right angles, many traces of the great history of Brazil.

Made wealthy by its sugar-cane and coffee-tree plantations, São Paolo has caught the train of industrialization and modernity in the middle of the nineteenth century. And, very quickly, from then on, everything accelerated. Uninterrupted waves of immigrants, mostly from Italy, Portugal, Northern Europe, but also from Japan (aren’t the best sushi in the world Paolian?) have nourished the town, feeding it with different cultures and know-how from every corner of the world. Today São Paolo has the biggest GDP in the Southern hemisphere and had grown in tentacular proportions, beyond the most unbelievable predictions, roaring, working, creating, exaggerating everything with no limit, a twin-sister of New-York, the town that never sleeps.

Over there, entertainment is not missing and, during the spell of your visit, you might think you are not in South America, not in Brazil, but in a city that surpasses imagination, makes you feel dizzy and absorbs you, dissolves you, charms you and blinds you, with its overwhelming neon-lights, its racket, its sounds and its fury. With theatres, museums, picture-galleries, cinemas, churches and miraculously preserved remains from the colonial period, but also with frantic shopping opportunities in the Avenida Paulista, international cuisine restaurants, São Paolo is captivating, fascinating. It questions you, enthrals you with its whimsical, wild side. You will be left dazzled, breathless and shaken.

Written by : © Jean-Paul Delfino (This text is subject to copyrights protection in accordance with existing laws)

Other texts by Jean-Paul Delfino are available here: Travel Diaries - Jean-Paul Delfino

Jean-Paul Delfino is a French writer and screenwriter so passionate about Brazil that he has taken on the writing of a major novel fresco entitled "Suite brésilienne" which covers three centuries of great Brazilian history.

Wikipedia : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Delfino