Conínbriga, Portugal: Not the Inspiration for Margaret Atwood But Who Cares?

It's been nearly a month since I posted here--too much interesting travel and not enough internet access to blog.

But I thought about books a lot.  One of the most striking was the echo of Margaret Atwood's short story collection Moral Disorder I heard in Conínbriga, Portugal. 

Atwood's stories are about the best she's done in a couple of decades, in my opinion.  She opens herself up as she has rarely, writing about people who are very much like herself and her family.  At first the reader may think the stories are unrelated, but each one throws light on some rather important concerns: what will become of the world we live in?  How to love?  Is there a connection between the concrete everyday world and something that transcends time and space?

This last lies at the center of the first story "The Bad News." An aging couple, Nell and Tig, struggle to deal with the bad news that awaits them every day in early Twenty-first Century newspaper headlines.  But Nell finds herself slipping into another time and place when the news was equally bad, Southern France in the Third Century C.E.   The barbarians are outside the gates, Romans like this other Nell have reason to be afraid.  The question Atwood poses is: should we prepare for the end of the world as we know it, too?

Conínbriga in central Portugal is very much like Glanum, the French ruined town that starts Nell's musings.  A thriving place for a couple of hundred years at the crossroads  of Roman thoroughfares on the Iberian peninsula, its people retrenched in the Third Century apparently out of fear for the advancing Barbarians.  They effectively abandoned part of the town, tearing houses down and  building a defensive wall five meters high inside of which they hung on for a couple of more centuries. 

The extent of the town was forgotten until the late 1920s when a Portuguese archeologist began excavation of the site.  Since then off a good portion of the town  has been uncovered.  The mosaics are extraordinary, and the House of Fountains, one of the houses left outside the wall, a dream of a Roman villa (see photo.)

Visiting ruins like this (or the medieval part of nearby Coimbra) invites speculation who lived there and what their lives were like.  Just as Atwood's collection suggests connections between incidents and people, so wandering through the vestiges of the past summons up reflections about human nature, strife and survival.