I had intricately planned my road trip exploring the Italian and German heritage of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost state, to maximize immigrant cuisine, unsung wineries and villages with charming timber-frame buildings. I’d visit Antônio Prado, the self-proclaimed “most Italian city in Brazil,” drive along rural roads lined with hydrangeas, and explore Gramado, a town whose center this time of year resembles an Epcot version of an Alpine ski town, decked out with Santa statues and massive candy canes.
But while Gramado’s Christmas parade had its charms and Antônio Prado’s nearly 50 landmark buildings were mesmerizing, unexpected encounters would repeatedly steal the show during my five-day adventure.
Take the impromptu concert that started when I pulled my car over one day near a meandering river. A roadside event was clearly winding down — a woman wiped down a long table, a few stragglers drank beer by a makeshift bar, and a handful of kids splashed in the water. A friendly man told me I had just missed a party celebrating the opening of a bridge to replace the one that had been damaged by tragic floods in May.
As I explained in Portuguese that I wanted to learn “about the immigrant traditions of the region,” a man grabbed an accordion and gathered members of his musical group — Grupo Náni, slogan: “Keeping Italian Cultures Alive” — to belt out “La Bella Polenta,” an immigrant ode to a cornmeal dish with origins in the Italian province of Veneto. The town mayor, one of the dillydallying drinkers, joined in too, and all were singing in Talian, a language that evolved from Venetian and other Italian dialects that their ancestors brought to this region of Brazil more than 100 years ago.
I live in Brazil, and have done the big tourist hits — Carnival in Rio, a cruise on the Amazon, the jaguars of the Pantanal. But pockets of immigrant cultures have always sparked my interest, and I had never experienced the vibrant European traditions that began with 19th-century migration and are still found in the Serra Gaúcha and the neighboring Taquari River Valley.
Throughout my jaunt, I stumbled upon a surprising number of music festivals, visited towns with names like Garibaldi and Teutônia, swigged Venetian-style “graspa” at a general store-turned-bar, and ate streusel cake at a German dance hall-turned-cafe. People spoke to me in Talian and two German dialects, Hunsrik and Westphalian, that many residents, especially in smaller towns, speak alongside Portuguese, Brazil’s national language. Welcomed everywhere, I was frequently regaled with proud tales of great-grandparents who left everything behind to make a hardscrabble living in a strange land.
The actual story is, of course, more complex. In this politically and culturally conservative region, the plight of the Indigenous population — forced out or killed by government-hired mercenaries in the 19th century — never came up unless I asked.
I found the area prosperous and largely safe, although still recovering from the May floods, with ongoing road construction sometimes necessitating delays and detours. English is not widely spoken, but modern translation tools work amazingly well and Brazilians are notoriously patient with foreigners. (The most common reaction I got when I said I was from the United States was “Que chique!” How chic!)
To plan my itinerary, I had the help of Luiz Radaelli, who runs a Talian-language radio station; Lucildo Ahlert, who leads a Westfalian cultural group; and Cibele Tedesco and Hugo Lorensatti, two stars of “Until the Music Is Over,” a bilingual Portuguese-Talian film I had seen in São Paulo before the trip.
Part of the film was shot in Antônio Prado, an easygoing municipality of 13,000 that calls itself the “most Italian town in Brazil.” Perhaps the town’s best-maintained landmark is Locanda Casa Verde, an olive green house with creamy yellow trim that was my home for a night. Lovingly restored with family photos and period furniture by the owner Clarice Bocchesse da Cunha Simm, it rents through Airbnb, but felt more like an inn that doubles as a history museum.
I had stumbled across another quasi-museum, this one German, a few days earlier outside Nova Petrópolis, about a two-hour drive south. I couldn’t resist the cobalt blue, timber-frame building labeled “Vó Hertha Café e Armazém” — Grandma Hertha’s Café and General Store — even though I was behind schedule.
Inside, I found the cafe more or less superimposed over what had been the Salão Schaefer, the region’s most ballyhooed German dance hall and wedding venue during the second half of the 20th century.
People there were speaking Hunsrik, the dialect they colloquially call German but I soon found out sounded quite different; when I tried to say “good morning” to Helena Rüchel, who was manning the counter, I quickly learned that it was not “Guten Morgen” but “Gumoind.”
Ms. Rüchel’s parents, Hertha and her husband, Edio, bought the place in 2003, and preserved the dance hall as it had been. They left the wooden ramp that led from the seating area (now the general store) to the dance floor (now the cafe), and on what used to be the stage, placed the wooden cradle Edio, now 72, and his 14 siblings had sequentially slept in as babies. A picture of Hertha and Edio dancing at a 1980 wedding in the hall adorns the wall.
I had coffee and streusel cake, where here is called “cuca” (from Kuchen, German for cake), and grabbed two products to go: a small bottle of sugar cane liquor most of Brazil calls cachaça but here is called schnapps, and a jar of crem, a shredded native root that Italian and German settlers found to be a viable substitute for horseradish.
My next stop was Lajeado, the urban hub of the Taquari Valley and home to an underfunded yet impressive outdoor museum of original German-style homes that had been disassembled, transported from across the region, and rebuilt. I was late to meet two of my sources, Mr. Ahlert and his neighbor and friend Mr. Radaelli.
They showed me around the towns of the Taquari River Valley, where we saw half-timbered homes ranging from crumbling to meticulously restored and met Waldemar Richter, the idiosyncratic former mayor of Forquetinha who constructed a neo-Germanic chapel and museum in his backyard (open to the public “if I’m home”). At a restaurant called Stacke, we enjoyed “cafe colonial,” a lavish brunch tradition involving bottomless bowls of sausage, blood sausage, eggs, cornbread, cuca and more.
We also visited the surprisingly wonderful Cactário Horst, a 2.7-acre cactus nursery in the town of Imigrante, where over 1,000 succulent species — some seemingly straight out of a Dr. Seuss illustration — are for sale.
At night in Lajeado, I attended a performance by Mr. Ahlert’s group, whose members, clad in wooden shoes, sang in Westphalian. They were followed by a youth orchestra and dance group featuring the blondest Brazilians teenagers I have ever seen assembled in one place, performing folkloric songs in traditional German dress.
I thought it was just dumb luck that I happened to be in town for such an event, but it turns out cultural and musical festivals are constants in the region; I went to five in three days, over what everyone said was a typical weekend.
My favorite by far was the Encontro de Coros, or “Chorus Festival,” held in the Catholic church of a 1,200-person speck of a town called Coronel Pilar.
Over two hours, a dozen choirs performed mostly traditional Talian songs. The highlight came at the end, when accordion players from each group banded together to lead a march to the community hall next door (where a dinner of steak, sausage and potato salad awaited), crooning the official anthem of Italian immigration to Brazil, “Merica Merica”:
“Thirty-six days in a steam ship,
And to America we arrived,
America, America, America,
What is this thing called America?”
My least favorite place was the one Brazilians love the most: Gramado. When I was there, tourists darted among countless chocolate shops, gift stores and fondue restaurants, a scene that I could have done without, but the Christmas parade, featuring roller-skating angels and dancing cupcakes, delighted the children around me.
Brazilians also flock to the region’s wineries, which may be charming (I loved the English-speaking guide named Celso at the family-run Casa Seganfredo) but don’t measure up to say, the Napa or Loire Valleys, each of which are significantly shorter flights from New York.
Instead, I found it rewarding to ask questions and be ready to change plans on a dime. It was 6:20 p.m. on a Sunday when I arrived at Locanda Casa Verde in Antônio Prado. I was ready to relax after a long day. But my host, Ms. Bocchesse, greeted me with urgency: I must hurry to a place just outside town called Armazém do Prado — it was closing soon and wouldn’t be open the next day.
I followed orders, and soon found myself on the porch of what used to be a general store, among a cluster of buildings that resembled a Wild West ghost town.
Márcia Marsilio, who grew up nearby, purchased Armazém do Prado during the pandemic, retaining its historic feel to create a lively (and on that Sunday evening, packed) bar where she and her husband, Marcelo Golin, mingled with guests nibbling on charcuterie plates loaded with salami, coppa, cheese and pickled onions.
Mingling may be an understatement, at least in Mr. Golin’s case. Before long he was coming around with a jug of what he called graspa, strongly “encouraging” patrons to take a swig of the fig-flavored liquor.
I guessed that “graspa” was the Talian word for grappa. The internet would later prove me correct — but just in case it hadn’t, I took a bottle home for further research.
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