Cultured Traveler: Out of the Past in Lively Old Rio

Andre Vieira for The New York Times

Left to right: Work by Beatriz Milhazes at the Paço Imperial, strolling down an Old Rio street and an installation of work by Cai Guo-Qiang at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil.

As Rio de Janeiro undergoes a face-lift in preparation for next year's World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics, what was old is once again new.

Miles from the future Olympic Village, the refurbished Maracanã stadium and the new subway stops that have turned streets in Ipanema and Leblon into construction sites, Rio's old downtown, the center of Brazil's public life for much of the 19th and 20th centuries, has come springing back over the past decade or so as an entertainment and cultural hub.

The resurgence goes beyond Lapa, a once-disreputable district on the outskirts of downtown whose revival has been so ballyhooed that there seems little new to say. Anytime I'm in the city that was once Brazil's capital, I find myself gravitating instead to a corner of downtown that is less frenetic and also offers a greater variety of attractions: Rio Antigo, or Old Rio, wedged between the former docks and Rua 1 de Março in one direction and Avenida Presidente Vargas and Praça XV de Novembro on the other.

Day or night, activity in the neighborhood centers on the quaint Rua do Ouvidor, lined with attractive open-air restaurants, art galleries, bookstores and shops selling everything from antiques to custom-made Panama hats. On a Saturday afternoon in July, the height of the Brazilian winter, the street was crowded with Rio residents lunching al fresco as groups of musicians strolled from table to table, singing and playing samba and chorinho, a style of acoustic music that is one of the predecessors of the samba.

Chorinho was developed in the 19th century, so it seems highly appropriate, a touch of historical symmetry even, to see it being played on a street whose first heyday came when Rio was the somewhat scruffy seat of an empire ruled by Pedro II. In her book "A Parisian in Brazil," an account of life in Rio in the 1850s, Adèle Toussaint-Samson remarked on the profusion of milliners, hairdressers, florists and pastry shops "displayed in all their splendor" along the Rua do Ouvidor, and took special note of the street's leisure-loving denizens.

"It is the daily rendezvous of the 'young men about town,' who, under the pretext of buying some cigars or cravats, come to flirt with the Frenchwomen, on whom they dote," she wrote. "This street, though narrow and ugly, is in some respects the Boulevard des Italiens of the capital of Brazil" — a reference to a street that was then the center of cafe society in Paris — and thus, she added in a burst of condescending enthusiasm, is "essentially a French street."

In my own case, I began to frequent Rio Antigo, sometimes called the Cultural Corridor, in the middle of the last decade, when a restaurant called Cais do Oriente, or Docks of the Orient, which had opened on the Rua Visconde de Itaboraí a couple of years earlier, began offering live jazz performances featuring top-flight Brazilian musicians. I was hesitant at first: when I first lived in Rio in the 1970s and worked on the other side of Avenida Presidente Vargas, I would sometimes lunch at a Japanese restaurant on Rua do Ouvidor, but once darkness fell, the neighborhood, genteelly shabby during the day, became a desert.

Cais do Oriente eventually stopped featuring jazz on a regular basis, but I kept going back to the area, in large part because I had by then discovered museums like the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, housed in an imposing neo-Classical building that used to be the headquarters of the central bank. The center opened in 1989, but its programming has become increasingly ambitious in recent years, so its popularity has grown: in July, a show called "Elles: Women Artists in the Pompidou Center Collection" was just wrapping up, and on previous visits I'd seen a large multimedia installation of work by Laurie Anderson, an M. C. Escher show and a selection of French Impressionist paintings.

More than once I've found myself spending nearly the entire day at the CCBB, as the center is known. After checking out the exhibitions — there is always more than one — I'll leisurely browse in the ground-floor bookstore, have a snack in the cafe, sit and read for a while in the imposing atrium and then spend the evening seeing a movie or attending a play or concert: in addition to its multiple galleries, the center has two cinemas and three theaters.

Larry Rohter, the New York Times's bureau chief in Rio de Janeiro from 1999 through 2007, is the author of "Brazil on the Rise." He is writing a history of Rio.

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