A aristocracia rural fluminense

This essay was written for one purpose only: to refute Gilberto Freyre’s statement that “Opulence of living, food, and domestic architecture was not as common among the former land and slave owners of our country as the bombastic speeches and improvised essays of today would have us believe.” Not so, writes Senhor Vianna de Castro—or at least not in the state of Rio de Janeiro. He sets about to refute Freyre with an impressive array of 46 photographs and of quotations from foreign travelers. His conclusion is that there was a rural aristocracy in Rio de Janeiro which lived very well and very comfortably. Left still to be decided is whether those aristocrats were the exceptions proving Freyre’s statement or whether they constituted a class sufficiently large enough to disprove the statement. There is undoubtedly plenty of room for more research on both sides of the question.