The dragon king Jorge Nuno Pinto da Costa was born at 6:10 am on December 28, 1937, after having disturbed the Christmas party of his mother, the austere Maria Elisa Bessa Lima Amorim. He was the fourth child of a marriage that would have two more children, just before it ended, due to a clear incompatibility between a deeply religious woman, born into one of the best families in Porto, and a man — Alexandrino Pinto da Costa — who loved his children too much. pleasures of life.
The different social origins of Alexandrino and Elisa would have been decisive in the outcome of the marriage, a fact that marked the education of their six children — José Eduardo, the eldest and a coroner who died in 2021, Maria Alice, teacher, António Manuel, Jorge Nuno, Eduardo Honório, who studied to be a priest and ended up a teacher, and Maria Eduarda, a maid.
Maria Elisa Bessa Lima Amorim descended from a family rich in money and parchments. Her grandfather, Honório de Lima, immortalized in the city’s toponymy, was a wealthy businessman, patron of arts and letters and one of Porto’s most renowned music lovers, as evidenced by the fact that he founded Orfeão Portuense, now gone. Owner of Teatro São João — which the family sold to the State in 1996 for more than five million euros — he was the promoter of memorable shows at the beginning of the century.
On one of his visits to Porto, the great Caruso sang in private for the Lima family, in a private auditorium attached to the mansion on Rua de Cedofeita, where the mother of the unavoidable president of FC Porto grew up. While his mother thrived in the midst of the great tenor’s private auditions, his father became a man amidst candied fruits, which made the king cake at Confeitaria Carlos Teixeira da Costa, in Foz Velha, the most famous in Porto. His paternal grandfather’s family had a pastry shop, a business where his uncle Carlos, the Porto leader, from whom little Jorge inherited his passion for blue and white, also worked.
Who knows, it may have been this decalage social the cause of the couple’s separation, a drama that led to the severe matriarchal education to which Jorge and his five brothers were subjected. Alexandrino was swept away from the family as soon as he was absent from home. Schoolmates thought that the Pinto da Costa boys were fatherless. Jorge Nuno gave up diapers when ‘blitzkriegHitler’s (lightning war) caused the fragile democracies of Europe to fall like dominoes, but Salazar and Elisa, each in their own way, spared the Pinto da Costa offspring from slaughter and deprivation.
