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Fascínio Oriental e Exílio Timorense

2003

Between the ages of 20 and 21, Maria Isabel d’Oliveira Pinto da França Tamagnini kept an extraordinary journal of a trip to Timor, covering a lengthy itinerary that took her from Lisbon to Dili, via Singapore and various cities in what is now the Republic of Indonesia, in the years 1882/1883. As part of the fourteen-person entourage to accompany her stepfather, Major Bento da França, the new governor of Timor, this journal is the only known historical Portuguese text dealing with the colonial territory of Timor to have been written by a woman. Her descriptions, written for pleasure, alternate between "oriental" fascination and the dramatic reality of the poor colonial Portuguese settlement in Dili accounted as a true exile.