Eclectic Romances

The Palacio de Monserrate rests on the soft peaks of Sintra, a fairy-tale-like cultural landscape near Lisbon in Portugal. The unique landscape parks surround the edifices that look like a crayon box advertisement representing both the romanticism and the eclecticism in the architecture of the 19th century during which romanticism required the emphasis on emotions and exhalted the images of the past such as the romantic images of ruins represented in nature. Consequently, the longing for the past  satisfied itself in the combination of the previous styles in many cases as it did in Sintra palaces. Once a person stands in any one of them, it is not possible not to seize these tendencies of the era; the lust, the greed, or the passion that surrounded their owners, those who seeked to have everything the ancestors of those lands had. The Monserrate, as a very fine example of such 19th century eclecticism and romanticism, was envisioned by Sir Francis Cook, a British merchant, on the ruins of a previous palace with Indian, Gothic and Moorish influences. It became a summer house for the family with its vast garden with dozens of different plants where one can even find a ruin of a church, not a ruined church under natural circumstances but one that was built intentionally as a ruined church, as one would have expected from such a palace that represents its kind so well. It is an abode, an abode for the back-then-newly-emerging social group that was not able to claim the Gothic or the Moorish palaces and its architecture of nobility, but then had the capital to reproduce it in its domestic quarters, in its fantasies, in its eclectic romances in which you can feel all languages and prayers echoing in its now empty corridors even long after the death.

"From my mouth you will year Arabic, Turkish, Castilian, Barber, Hebrew, Latin, and vulgar Italian, because all languages and prayers belong to me. But I belong to none of them. I belong only to God and to the earth, and it is to them that I will one day soon return."

goes the best quotation to summarize the feeling in Sintra

by Amin Maalouf in Leo Africanus