This place is also - with its never-ending birdsong, the trickling waterfall meandering through the property, the tinkling chimes - the home of a true romantic, filled with symbols and talismans and secret messages to his lover, only a fraction of which (I’m guessing) will any visitor comprehend. La Chascona (the name refers to the wild tangle of Matilde’s hair, a recurring element in his poems) is the kind of house I love best - the fabulous, wacky, excessive creation of a man for whom objects took on deep emotional meaning - not necessarily for their intrinsic value, and possibly not for their conventional beauty either, but as an expression of the dreams of the person who assembled them. As much as he was a poet, Neruda was a collector of things, a builder of homes and a designer of fantastical spaces. In fact, “interior decoration” is an insufficient phrase. What I recognized, even at the entryway - with its ragtag assemblage of wrought-iron garden furniture and mosaic tile inlays, the mural of birds and vines winding around the arched door, the hand-forged circular staircase and glass balls from ships’ buoys and orange trees and sculptures of angels - was that whatever fondness I might feel for Neruda’s poetry, my truest kinship with this man who died over 40 years ago would be with his sense of interior decoration. Who better to fan the flames than Neruda? These last few nights on our trip, I suggested to Jim, he and I could read poems out loud to each other and maybe memorize a few. My intention was to pick up a book of Neruda’s poetry at the gift shop. (One striking exception: Casa Azul, Frida Kahlo’s house in Mexico City.) Take the artist out of the house and what you are likely to have, more often than not, is a collection of rooms and some old furniture. I’ve taken a fair number of house tours on my travels - often discovering that all the things I’d most like to see (the artist’s paintings, her desk or painting studio) were either sold off or sent to museums. A promising stop, perhaps, but I kept my expectations low. When we got to the bottom again, it deposited us a block away from La Chascona, the house the poet bought in 1951 (while still married to his second wife, Delia del Carril) for his then-secret lover, Matilde Urrutia. Riding the funicular to the top of Parque Metropolitano, the classic tourist activity, seemed like a requirement.

My husband, Jim, and I had been traveling through Chile, with a single day to spend in the capital. The idea of paying a visit to Pablo Neruda’s home in Santiago had come as an afterthought.

Matilde urrutia