Lisbon for The Romantics: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

Sit under Camões's stone sea monster with the students and watch the Tagus go from pewter to gold behind the bridge.

A narrow bar hung with football scarves where amateurs sing between the professionals; arrive early, order the chouriço, and go quiet when the lights drop.

No reservations, a chalkboard that changes by the hour, and marble-topped tables lit low enough to forgive anyone.

Take tram 28 to its last stop: avenues of family chapels with lace curtains in the doors, cypress shade, and a view down to the bridge.

The last flat the poet rented, with his glasses, his horoscope charts and the library he annotated in three languages.

Dinner at a café behind the São Carlos opera house, on a square a step from where Pessoa was born. Ask for a window table and linger after the show crowd.

A seventeenth-century family still lives upstairs; downstairs, the tiled battle gallery and a garden of mossy busts and a green tank.

A convent of gilded chapels around five centuries of tile, ending in the long blue panorama of Lisbon before the earthquake.

The splurge: a short tasting menu in a plain white room off the bar street, French technique on Portuguese fish, unhurried and barely lit.

A blank Jesuit front hiding the Chapel of St John the Baptist, assembled in Rome from lapis and agate and shipped here in pieces.

The university's 1878 botanical garden on the Príncipe Real slope, palms and dragon trees, a bench for two and no crowds on a Monday.

A 1922 mirrored salon with waiters in waistcoats, a bica and a pastel de nata before the airport metro from Saldanha.