Journey to Portugal by José Saramago

The traveller would like to continue along the bank of the River Tagus, but the highway heads away from it, and it is only beyond Montalvo that the road finds its way back-and this time to not one, but two rivers. This is Constància the beautiful, even more so when seen from the far side of the river, in its magnificent amphitheatre, with its houses clambering up towards the parish church of Nossa Senhora dos Milagres. To reach it, the traveller needs strong legs and a good pair of lungs. But this fine spring weather fills the path with the overpowering scent of roses, so that he does not even feel the effects of the steep climb.

The statues inside recall certain Baroque Italian churches, and this effect is strangely reinforced by the roof painting, by José Malhoa, which shows Nossa Senhora da Boa Viagem blessing the union of the rivers Zèzere and Tagus, and is far less realist than the traveller's school lessons had led him to believe. Malhoa was certainly influenced by the statues he saw around him. The traveller enjoyed the seventeenth-century bas-reliefs brought from the chapel of St Anne, especially the fresh way that the usually solemn Baptism of Christ is treated: while it shows in the foreground the conventional scene, in the background it depicts an earlier moment: that is, when St John the Baptist is taking his boots off and Christ is lifting his tunic over his head, leaving him naked from the waist down, although here naturally enough his body is concealed to preserve the necessary modesty.