In the literature of travel, two traditional orders come up, the journal and the guide, as well as two characters, the traveler and the cicerone. The objective of this article is to advance in the comprehension of cities as some cultural field on the perspective of both the travel and the travelers. In order to do so, I propose the rethinking of the distance between Mário de Andrade and Gilberto Freyre, central figures of Brazilian modernism and anthropology, by examining their travel experiences. More specifically we show a meeting between these two diverse personalities, sometimes antagonistic, in a common topos to access the Brazilian culture: Northern and Northeastern Brazilian cities caught in the crisis of the agro-exporting and patriarchal regimes with their remains of landscape and character, peoples and ways of life, memories, urban setup, architecture, folklore, art. The reading bases are the journals and chronicles written by the writer from São Paulo state along his two long ethnographical journeys to the Amazonian (1927) and to the Northeastern (1928/1929) regions as well as youth journals, newspaper chronicles, and the Guia Prático, Histórico e Sentimental da Cidade do Recife (1934) - "Practical, Historical, and Sentimental Guide of the City of Recife (1934)," by the anthropologist from Pernambuco state. If the option for such writings - less important in their authorship but constituting solid positions in the genre - instigates the tourist and the cicerone towards a relation of proximity, it is possible to take a snapshot of, together with the pleasurable travel, an exploratory and ethnographic dimension of the modern society.
Mário de Andrade; Gilberto Freyre; Travel; Cities; Brazilian modernism