Bela Vista

This guide to Bela Vista in São Paulo, known to residents as Bixiga, traces the crowded tenement houses where Italian immigrants rented rooms from each other around 1890. It follows the neighborhood's disputed name, one account tracing it to a landowner named Antônio Bexiga, another to an old slaughterhouse or a smallpox site. You'll hear how by 1900 more than half of São Paulo's population was Italian-born. Listen for the cantinas still lining these narrow streets.