Parque Municipal "Alfredo Volpi"

This guide to Parque Municipal Alfredo Volpi in São Paulo follows a teenage housepainter decorating the mansions of São Paulo's coffee families in the early 1900s, mixing his own colors and stretching his own canvases long before that patient hand made him a celebrated modernist. It also traces the ground itself, a nineteenth-century tea farm that later became some of the city's most expensive real estate before the city took it over in 1949 and let it sit overgrown for two decades. Best heard walking the tree-lined trails past the park's lakes and springs.