São Paulo in a day: art and markets

The MASP, the São Paulo Museum of Art, suspends its concrete and glass structure on four red pillars eight meters high, leaving a covered public space underneath that remains perpetually open to passersby.

The Mercado Municipal, covered by Art Nouveau glass panels from 1933, sells from its stalls the famous mortadella sandwich as tall as a plate, alongside tropical fruits and Portuguese codfish in enormous quantities.

The Pátio do Colégio, on the site where Jesuits founded the city in 1554, preserves a reconstructed chapel and a small museum that tells the missionary origins of what would become one of the world's largest cities.

The Beco do Batman, an alley in the Vila Madalena neighborhood, constantly changes its appearance: local street artists paint and repaint the same walls over decades, in a perpetual turnover of murals.

Between the red pillars of MASP and the constantly repainted walls of Beco do Batman, São Paulo shows a constant: here nothing stays still long enough to become a monument.

Even the site of its foundation, Pátio do Colégio, has been rebuilt multiple times — consistent with a city that reinvents itself faster than it can be photographed.