Lisbon is a city of two logics, and this first episode sets them against each other. On the hill below the castle, the Alfama survives as a labyrinth of stepped alleys, arches and tiled facades, the quarter that the earthquake of 1755 largely spared and where the medieval and Islamic street plan is still readable. Below it, along the river, lies the Baixa, an entirely different proposition: after the earthquake, the fire and the wave that destroyed central Lisbon, the Marquis of Pombal ordered the district rebuilt on a strict rectangular grid, with standardised facades and one of the earliest anti-seismic timber framing systems ever applied at urban scale. Between the two run the funiculars, the tram lines and the viewpoints that structure daily movement across the slopes. The film reads these contrasting fabrics as a single history, that of an Atlantic capital enriched by empire, levelled in a morning and rebuilt as a manifesto of the Enlightenment.
