For The Love Of Port

Very sad. I suppose there are people that want "real" tiles, but it seems to me you could eliminate a lot of the demand, particularly among tourists, by making reproductions. And with current technologies, you can even reproduce famous existing buildings and murals. I would rather have a reproduction of a known entity, say one of the murals in São Bento station, than a stolen tile from who knows where.

When I was in Cambodia some years ago, we visited a school where they were teaching people to reproduce the carvings like you see at Angkor Wat, etc. We bought a few of their pieces.

Funny story!?!

Several years ago, I was visiting the Blandy's Madeira lodge in Funchal. There is a huge and very old mural on the main wall in their visitor's center. I noticed this young woman working in a tiny area with a fine and narrow bristled paint brush, mending parts of the mural. I walked very close to capture her hand and the piece she was painting with my Nikon. She didn't seem to mind and so, I said nothing and took several pics. I then noticed her face, and it too was like a piece of artwork, simply, drop dead gorgeous. I took another photo from a different angle capturing her beauty.

After the Fortification Tour ended, I wrote to my friend, Chris Blandy and sent the photos and asked more details about the mural and mentioned that he had an incredibly gifted painter and beautiful artist doing the restorative work.

His one liner back to me. "Thanks Roy. That is my wife."

Talk about turning red! Fortunately I was alone in my hotel room.

I think we both had a good laugh and he also shared that his wife had studied at a world renowned art school in France, and that her area of expertise was art history and restoring historic paintings.

I remember that!
But I remember that she studied in Rome. These were the murals by Romer. Chris later said he hoped he got a relative's discount!
And she's a decendent of the Lomelinos.