Forty odd years before when I was a small child, I used to play happily on the cobblestones of San Francisco square, the only one in those days that had flocks of pigeons fluttering around freely. A golden eternal universe, located in the shadow of that immense temple, San Francisco the Great, of the 16th century, and the small shrines of the Miracle and of the Virgin of Solitude. A square surrounded by mansions that, of course, for me were not part of any historical heritage, but the old houses of the quarter of my grandmother Julia who lived round the corner.

My grandmother lived in Calle del Milagro. I remember the cooker with the wood stove, a stone mortar and above all the high skylight windows, the same as the other skylight windows of the neighborhood. It was said that from one of these skylights a giant cat had hung and fell on the head of a good lady called Clara Elvira, who, from that moment on, became as mad as a hatter. In general all the old center of Lima (or historic center) was according to me (or my memory) peopled by crazy old people with very white faces covered by mantillas and wearing crow wing black cloaks. They were magic, like shadowy bulky objects standing out against the high rose or melon colored walls, the temples the small palaces, the alleys and the houses of the neighborhood. Now that I think about it, each weekend that I spent in my grandmother's house, I lived between the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as if nothing had ever happened although in reality I lived outside any time zone or age.

Lima at that time was full of canons and processions and all my Grandmothers friends were member of the Tertiary Order. The most famous procession, of course, was that of the Lord of Miracles (also known as the Lord of the Earth Tremors). I remember it with terror, standing on the corner (always with my grandmother) I felt, even before the procession arrived, how the multitude dressed in purple approached, slowly, ever more deafening, with their canticles, their band, their groans, their dense incense smoke. The supreme terror took a hold of me, a four year old child, as soon as I saw the litter of the Lord crucified.

More peaceful were the Easter Week celebrations, especially all those of Easter Saturday, when holding my grandmother's hand, we went round the Stations of the Cross. That is we visited the churches, silent with their candled altars, indicating that Jesus had died the day before. Days without mass or consecration, The grand colonial temples, of our itinerary. San Pedro, Las Nazarenas, Son Agustín, La Merced, San Marcelo, Santo Domingo, the Lima Cathedral and the neighboring Parish of the Sacrarium, were I was baptized and where, two years before that my parents had married. Another tour of the colonial churches, although this time for Christmas, consisted in visiting the Nativity scenes or mangers, some of them real marvels that occupied, among the streams and frosty hills full of shepherds, and sheep and giraffes and tigers and elephants and the Child and Mary and Joseph and the three wise men, some dozens of square meters. They were temples of dimly lit naves and altars covered in silver and gold leaf Baroques, plateresques, neoclassics, flanked by altarpieces of warring archangels and miraculous saints. There was none more saintly; however than Santa Rosa of Lima, patron of the Americas and the Philippines, born in 1586 and dead at the age of 31, after having lived a mortified life of sacrifice and pain that she offered gladly to divine Jesus, with whom she had celebrated nuptials during her puberty.

On the corner by the church of San Pedro, famous for its funeral services, was the palace of the Marquis of Torre Tagle. Almost three centuries of perfectly preserved patios, colonnades and balconies. Then, as now, it was Peru's Foreign Ministry. I can also remember that in between visits to the church of Santo Domingo (a saint for whom my grandma had a special fondness) we would pass the Oquendo Mansion, a town house dating from the end of the 18th Century and now beautifully restored and known by the name of its original owner, the Osambela Mansion. Just like some of the other mansions from Lima's colonial era it was a mass of earthy colors, with Moorish balconies and a steeple-like tower Although what fascinated me most about this building was that it had - or so they said - a high vantage point from which the owner, a prosperous merchant, could see his ships in the far-off port of Callao. Nevertheless, now that I think about it, our walks along Conde de Superunda had more to do with my grandma's visits to the Central Post Office than her devotion to Santo Domingo. A huge building, with a gallery an entire city block in length, with a glass roof through which you could see the sun or the clouds.

Desamparados railroad station (the oldest in South America) dates from the same time, the early Republican era. With its splendid stained glass windows it is today an art gallery. Once, though, it was the starting point for many happy childhood excursions to Chosica and Chaclacayo whose villas were surrounded by fertile gardens on the banks of the River Rimac, some twenty miles from the capital. Apart from the city's inheritance from the colonial period, there was another Lima, that of the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries, which for me - and / still don't know why - was the very essence of modernity. Occasionally - very occasionally - we would venture out of the narrow streets with their damp walls and huge chicken runs to cross, for example, Tacna Avenue. On it there was a brightly lit store, not one of those timber establishments runs by ancient Chinese, where we would buy - and what a treat! a bunch of two of muscatel grapes.

Although situated in the old center, they were of the same lineage, at least as far as / can remember, the old French drug store where one could buy ice cream and sherbets, and the Italian Stores of Cordano, Tubino, Queirolo and Cuneo & Bandirola, from where my father on some festive occasions would take my grandmother a good mold of Parmesan cheese, a salami sausage or a roast turkey dressed with attractive lettuces. Others were the trips made with my father to Capon Street in Chinatown (the most important in Latin America) to obtain pork pasties or steamed shrimps.

Of course and fortunately the historic center of Lima does not only belong to my nostalgia but also to my reality. This gathering of temples and palaces, of housing quarters and businesses, some bigger some smaller, forms a living city, the sequence and heir of the three times crowned City of Kings, founded in 1535 and, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most opulent of South America. The zone that has been declared intangible by UNESCO, occupies nothing less than 900 blocks. Of course this city, like our lives has suffered the flux and reflux of time and the country, attaining in the sixties and seventies decades of the past century an obvious decadence. Since then, with its highs and lows, successive Municipal managements, certain companies and the cooperation of friendly countries, Spain above all, have worked in the restoration of many of the old buildings of the "Cercado", "Barrios Altos" and "Bajo el Puente" (the right bank of the river). This has occurred while the streets for better or worse have been given more light and order. A very difficult task, in a conglomerate that, as I have stated, has no pretensions of being museum, but belongs to the daily and palpitating pulse of a city.

Antonio Cisneros
Poet and writer