Pablo Neruda

I spent half my university career studying Pablo Neruda in one way or another. He's Chile's greatest poet, won a Nobel Prize for literature, and ranks as one of the top five poets of the twentieth century (top one, if you ask me). And so we couldn't very well come to Santiago and not visit his house.

We took the Metro out to Barrio Bellavista and walked up to La Chascona, one of Neruda's three houses in Chile. He lived here with his third wife, Matilde, whose nickname was La Chascona after her perpetually unruly hair. We took a tour: the house had been mostly destroyed by the good old Chilean military in the 1973 coup, but it is now restored more or less as it would have been when Neruda lived there. We walked through his dining room, three (!) bars, bedroom, library and study. Neruda, as any Cambridge Modern Linguist will tell you, was obsessed with the sea, and La Chascona was constructed along the lines of a ship - low ceilings, squeaky floors, often at wacky angles, and lights and furniture taken from actual vessels. It was all very interesting, especially for me!