Livraria Lello is the most photographed bookshop on earth for a reason that isn’t apparently true. The story goes that J.K. Rowling browsed here and the red staircase became Hogwarts. She has said plainly that she never set foot inside and didn’t know it existed. She did live in Porto teaching English in the early nineties. Just not here. Whatever. Do yourself a favor and go. The real story is better: It opened in 1906. The Lello brothers wanted a building that would stand out in the city and the world, and the engineer Francisco Xavier Esteves gave them carved wood, a stained-glass skylight, a red forked staircase, and Portuguese writers cut in relief into the pillars. Nobody builds a bookshop like that unless they believe literature deserves a monument. 🫶 Then it nearly died. By 2015 fewer than one in ten people who walked in bought a book. The fix was almost too simple: charge for entry, then take the ticket price off the book. Last year they sold more than a million. 👏👏👏 e...