Gonçalo Cadilhe nos trilhos de Santo António em Portugal: Intimidades de um Olhar em Por Este Reino Acima. No Primeiro Trekking da História de Portugal

Abstract

A well-known figure on the stage of contemporary Portuguese travel literature with already fifteen published works, Gonçalo Cadilhe focuses on issues of identity, imagology, space, textual and ontological nature, almost always using the format of the journalistic chronicle, among other brief forms. In fact, this is an author whose writing emerges from a work with a structural spatial referentiality in the travelogue, as a look that comes to rest on a physical and human geography. Thus, starting from the work Por este reino acima. No primeiro trekking da História de Portugal (2020), I intend to problematize the author's gaze on the interior of Portugal today, along his walk in the footsteps of young Santo António, aiming to collect, not only the current images of the country, but also to underline his debut through the webs of fictional narrative. Above all, the book focuses on the first trekking of a Portuguese travel writer through national geographic territories and historiographic metafiction, on the recreation of the biography of Santo António on a journey through the textual space where a porous writing arises, betting on the convergence between the real and the fiction or just a “frictional literature” (Ette 2003:31)