For those who believe in Fado, Matteo's story will suit them

Il Fado

For those who believe in destiny, which in Portuguese is said doom, my story will do for you.

A tiny piece of paper inviting me to follow my favorite team abroad and that I noticed by pure chance among the tables of a pizzeria. An unexpected and absolutely unlikely trip with a friend to see a football match. The discovery of a city I had never been to. Which I only knew from the books of Tabucchi and Saramago. One night we decided to go out at the last moment to enter a very crowded bar. Randomly chosen from among a thousand others. A small table that came free as we were leaving, now tired of waiting. Two smiling girls in front of us on the other side of the table who were almost finished, and the rest that somehow can also be imagined ...

Almost twenty years have passed since that evening in March. One of those girls is the mother of my 2 children. And if she hadn't been sitting at that table, I really think I would never have written this article.

A few years earlier I had graduated in architecture. At the time I was starting to work on my own, after doing some practice in a studio in Grosseto, where I was born.

The choice to leave

A year after that trip that changed my life, suitcase on my shoulder, I took the one-way plane to what has become my city in a very short time.

Different, charming and welcoming. These are three of the possible words to describe Lisbon. Which welcomed me from the beginning as it has always welcomed everyone, Portuguese and non-Portuguese. In other words, with that calm and generosity that characterizes sea ports. Always a crossroads of people and stories.

I have never felt a stranger to it in this city of many souls. Now modern and technological, now popular and true. And that in those years of the end of the millennium also offered many job opportunities, to architects but not only.

Lately less lavish in terms of offers (the crisis has made itself felt here ...) Lisbon has not lost its charm in the slightest, it continues alive and in continuous transformation, recently riding a tourist boom that has given many, myself included, new job opportunities.

For a long time now I have had the pleasant sensation of returning home when I get on the plane that takes me back to the banks of the Tejo, in this city that I continue to visit and discover every day with the typical curiosity of those who were not born there, and who at the at the same time I feel more and more mine, as if in reality I have lived here for centuries, as if mine doom was somehow already written ...